


The Game Is Afoot

by notapartytrick, TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, DUM-E is a dog, Drowning, First Meetings, Fluff, Historical Inaccuracy, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, I Tried, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Multi, Nobody Dies, Pepper is basically Mrs. Hudson, Peter is still a baeby and Rhodey disapproves of everything tony does, Precious Peter Parker, Sherlock Holmes AU, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony and Rhodey bicker like an old married couple, Tony is Holmes and Rhodey is Watson, Whump, roughly follows the events of Homecoming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:07:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23258908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notapartytrick/pseuds/notapartytrick, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: Tony's face lights with childlike glee and he presses the industrial goggles to his face. "Are these more of a decorative or practical function, then? Can you see in them--?""Yes, yes, yes I can," Peter stutters, springing forward to snatch the entire pile from Tony's hands. "I can--I can see in them. Could we just--what's--"Tony levels him a look. "So you are the rooftop-capering vigilante.""I do not, I do not caper.""Chimney tumbler.""You have me mistaken for Santa Claus, Mr. Stark.""Very well. Wall-crawler?""No. Sir.""Jungle swinger?""Just--Arachnoman is fine."Tony blinks. "I--I beg your pardon.Arachnoman? Lordy, you suffer the same linguistic disease as poor Rhodey downstairs."--Private detective Tony Stark is enjoying a brief respite from solving cases when his roommate Dr. Rhodes informs him of a masked vigilante in Queens. Tony quickly deduces the poor guy can't be more than an actual boy. Cue the first meeting with Peter Parker that will spark an unlikely partnership fighting crime.
Relationships: James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, May Parker (Spider-Man) & Tony Stark, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 98
Kudos: 159





	1. Indeed, an Infant

**Author's Note:**

> So I convinced my mum to sit down and watch both Sherlock Holmes films with me today and I may have gone slightly feral with this AU idea. Please don't expect too much actual mystery to follow if I find the wherewithal to continue in this universe, because while my passion may be of admirable proportions, my plotting skills are severely nonexistent. (Seriously. My works here on ao3 consist of domestic fluff, domestic fluff, domestic conversations about angst, and...more plotless fluff.)
> 
> All the same, I have never been MORE STOKED for an idea since I was, like, a child not yet jaded by life. Also, I listened to a whole bunch of Vivaldi string concertos while typing this all on my phone and it definitely shows.
> 
> Oh, and, i was too sleep deprived to do any decent research on fashion and buildings of the late, like, Victorian period I guess, so please assume this entire thing is from some hand-wavey moment in history where people dressed like they did in the Downey Holmes movies. :) Thanks :)))

A gust of eau de Manhattan greets Tony as the morning's paper slaps down onto the desk in front of him.

Tony arches a single brow upward at Rhodey, who has set his hat on the table with a pinched expression at the violin in Tony's hand.

"Rhodey, old boy!" Tony says with a winsome smile. "As much pleasure as it brings me to see your cynical face round these parts so early in the morning, I do wonder why it is you and not Miss Potts who brings me the paper today."

"I live down the hall, Tony," the other man returns with the boredom of one who has put up with this kind of early-morning nonsense for one decade too many. "As for Miss Potts' whereabouts, I am surprised myself why you have not deduced that already."

Tony gives another cursory tug of his bow, holds the note for another screechy moment, and then tosses the bow in a nearby sheaf of papers. "A matter of charity on my part, Jim. I have already detected that the good Miss Virginia is out and about entertaining the dog like the kindhearted landlady that she is."

Rhodey steeples his fingers. "You know very well that's not why she is out of the house. Thanks to your dabbles in chemistry last night, Dummy appears to have acquired superhuman--excuse me, supercanine--strength, and you have neglected to inform either one of us. What a wonderful morning greeting it was to see the couch that I bought, again, shredded to ribbons. Again."

Tony waves a hand dismissively in his best friend's direction. "Nothing that a snappy little case for a wealthy widow wouldn't reimburse. And a game of chess with the lovely Miss Potts over a bowl of strawberries."

"She detests strawberries."

"Yes. Precisely. I knew this." Tony clears his throat and snaps his fingers at Rhodey. "This is more than a social call to chastise me for my inattentiveness toward the landlady's dietary restrictions. Out with it."

Rhodey graces him with a final eye-roll before pushing the paper closer to the other man. "Now, I know how you feel about meddling in other boroughs' affairs when you are in the more...melodic phases of your semi-retirement," he says with a glance at the violin on the desk, "but perhaps this will pique your interest."

Tony's gaze flits down to the headline. _Rooftop-Capering Vigilante Continues to Mete Out Justice Against Petty Crime, Identity Wanted by NYPD_. The man sniffs and crosses his arms.

"Indeed. My interest is piqued."

"I did a smidge of digging myself," Rhodey continues. "Other sources confirm that the vigilante's activities have been confined to the borders of Queens. And that he appears to get around by jumping and swinging and--for lack of a better term--tumbling about."

Tony lays one socked foot on the desk and crosses the other--quite bare--at the ankles. He hums at the ceiling. "And these sources are not of a printed nature?"

"No."

"Eavesdropped on them yourself?"

"I prefer the term vicarious interviewing, but yes."

"And when was this, dear doctor?" Tony drawls.

"Just today, before I came back in with crackers and the paper."

"Lordy," Tony says with a blink. "Your ungodly morning habits never fail to unnerve me."

"So what do you think?"

"I think--" Tony raises a finger, head cocked toward the window. "Yes, that would be the sound of Miss Virginia sharing a laugh with the baker's boy across the street. She is in significantly higher spirits. Dummy's been found, the both of us forgiven."

"I need no forgiveness," Rhodey points out. "And I was referring to the vigilante."

"I know you were referring to the vigilante," Tony tuts. "This single-minded focus of yours, Jimmy, that is what will get you whacked on the head one of these days. Your attention must be flying from one corner of the room to the next in order to observe everything and anticipate anything."

"You have your methods, and I have mine, and they have always worked. So allow me to be obstinately single-minded, because I'd like to actually have a decent conversation with you before I leave again to see my first patient, thank you very much, Tony. Thoughts on this vigilante?"

"Hm. The curious case of the rooftop caperer. I declare we have a young man on our hands, no more than college age, with a singular and recent clash with crime to trigger such a passionate undertaking."

"Age and motive, noted," Rhodey murmurs, already digging in the left breast pocket of his jacket for his notebook.

"Articles note his agility to be impressive, if inexperienced."

It's Rhodey's turn to lift a brow at him. "You have been researching."

"Skimming," Tony corrects him. "It's not often the papers are filled with word of anyone fighting crime rather than committing it."

"Would you hazard a guess as to his level of education? Or if not, his vocation?"

Tony squints into space. "The first time anything was printed on this guy, I had pegged him for a day laborer: specifically construction. His initial nighttime forays adhered to a particular radius, one that demanded familiarity with the lumber warehouses and construction district there."

"But then there was that one piece, about two weeks ago," Rhodey jumps in, catching on. "He ventured out in the afternoon. Quite early. And the last sighting of him was just past midnight, rather than the wee hours of the morning."

A lopsided grin lights up Tony's face. "Your analytical prowess shines when you're less cantankerous."

"Yes, yes. And I analyze your diet of cigars and Beethoven to be woefully inadequate."

"Don't you have other patients to attend to, Jimmy? Quivering hypochondriacs who actually pay you?"

Rhodey snaps his little notebook shut, entirely unimpressed. "Amusing how you recall my profession the instant I use my lifelong training to preserve your well-being."

"It must be the lingering psychological trauma of that fall from the tower, Jimmy," Tony says brightly. "Never again do I want to wake up in the middle of surgery to be greeted by your judging little eyes."

Rhodey rolls his eyes. "And so what have we deduced about the caperer's schedule?"

"Pay attention to the months, beary bear. The earlier capering took place at the turn of the fall. Who else has such a schedule change?"

"College students," Rhodey fills in with a nod. "Perhaps with a summer job that kept him occupied during the afternoons before."

"Or," Tony rejoins, "a curfew."

"We are treading the realm of speculation, Tony."

"My favorite."

"I do not like the implications of where this is going. Are you saying this is an--an underage young man?"

"Yes. Quite young."

"Are you suggesting he could be younger than a college student?"

"Indeed. An infant."

"Good God," says Rhodey. "I need a smoke."

"What we need," Tony corrects him with a slap of his feet on the hardwood as he straightens from his chair, "is one of Miss Potts' scrumptious croissants and coffee, and your best walking shoes."

"We are not paying the boy a visit."

"So you succumb to logic and admit he is a boy. And yes, old sport, we are very much visiting him."

"I have--a job. Old women to attend to."

Tony grabs a scarf from the coat tree amid the chaos of the room, and twirls around to face Rhodey as he swings the scarf round his neck. "I thought you preferred me when I was more forgetful of your profession. So as not to remind you of your oath-taking, oh, yes, in matters such as _first do no harm_ \--"

"The only harming I do is when I am around you," Rhodey mutters. "And soon enough, _to_ you."

"Aw," Tony crows. "That lands quite a solid eight on my scale of rejoinders. There's hope for you yet."

\--

Peter takes the stairs by two, whistling tunelessly, and swings the door of his apartment open. "May!" he calls out. He tosses his bundle of books on the corner table in the foyer and peeks around. "May, do you remember when I told you about Ned's idea last week? Well, we had an epiphany earlier and we agreed--oh."

Peter skids to a halt at the entrance to the kitchen, where his aunt is seated at the round table across from two rather...full-grown-looking men in waistcoats.

"Right," Peter gulps. "Um."

"Hello, dear," says Aunt May.

"Whatever it is we still owe, I promise we will make the next payment, please, sir, just be patient," Peter stammers. He directs his plea to the man seated closer to him, a respectable-looking one with an official air about him and a top hat in his lap. He stares back at Peter with a visage torn between pity and exasperation.

The other man, significantly more untidy upon closer inspection--though dressed at odds with his impeccably trimmed facial hair--clears his throat with a poorly concealed smirk.

"We are not debt collectors, Mr. Parker," he says conversationally. "I doubt your aunt, as hospitable as she may be, would be offering us tea and--and her _delightful_ little biscuits, if we were, in fact, debt collectors."

Peter's gaze flicks over to May. The stranger is right. Behind her brunette curls and easy smile, May Parker's wrath is nothing to be trifled with. He also knows just how delightful of a disaster May's biscuits are, and so he waves her off with a polite and pained grin when she holds out the tin in his direction.

"Very theatrical," the first man remarks.

"Hardly," says the second man. "Apologies, Mr. Parker. This is my colleague, Dr. James Rhodes--fine man, saved my unfortunate behind numerous times through the revolutionary horrors of medicine--and I am Stark. Anthony Stark."

"Mr. Stark," Peter squeaks. He looks over at May. "May? Why is Mr. Stark sitting in our kitchen?"

"He was just about to tell us when you arrived," says May. "Something about an...educational opportunity. Be a dear and pull up a chair and hear the gentlemen out." She's clearly vibrating, pinning Peter with a question look. The boy widens his eyes back at her, completely nonplussed.

"Yes," Tony says, drumming his fingers on the tablecloth. "This is about your...application. To the…"

"September Foundation," Rhodey supplies, clearly disapproving of the name for some wildly indiscernible reason.

"Right. Of course. The September Foundation."

Peter raises his brows. "And this...is...the thing I applied for back in…?"

"September," Tony says quickly. He coughs into his fist. "Mrs. Parker, would you be so kind as to excuse us, me and your nephew here? There are some particulars I am keen on discussing and his...candidness is of utmost priority."

That makes May widen her eyes further at the boy, who only shoots her a doubly panicked look.

"Er," Peter says. "All right. We could...converse in the other room."

"Excellent," Tony says with a clap. "Rhodey, light of my life, keep the good Mrs. Parker company, won't you?"

"They do say I am the charmer between the two of us," Rhodey grumbles under his breath.

Tony snorts and pats his friend on the shoulder in passing. "I recall precisely no one who said that, but you'll note I am feeling magnanimous today. Now. I will be back in a flash."

\--

Peter whirls the instant he and Tony have entered the other room and the door has swung shut. "I never applied to a September Foundation," he says with newfound, albeit stammering, boldness.

"Indeed you did not. A bit clumsy of me, but really, your aunt--charming woman--just the slightest bit frightening--is none the wiser. Flimsier covers have worked for me in more delicate situations."

The boy leans against the wall, crossing and uncrossing his arms in an aborted attempt at virility. "And what--what kind of situation is this, Mr. Stark?"

Tony peers at him over the top of his round lenses and cuts straight to the chase. "A vigilante kind of situation, Mr. Parker."

Peter, the poor boy, visibly stiffens. "What do you--what do you mean, vigilante? I haven't--May and I, we live alone, we have not been-- _harboring_ \--I know nothing about--"

"This makes me infinitely glad no one has ever heard you speak during your nightly escapades," Tony says dryly.

Peter sniffs and wrinkles his nose. "Look now, Mr. Stark, I know you are a great detective and we are more than honored to have you visit, but there have been no crimes in this building and no, no vigilantes, no people leaping off roofs, no--"

"I never said people were leaping off roofs," Tony interrupts quietly.

"You--you…" Peter falters. The roundness of his eyes stretches so wide as to be comical and pitiful at once.

Tony twists his mouth. Slips a hand in his pocket and gestures with the other. "So. Where are we hiding the costume?"

Inevitably, fleetingly, like the spike in a heartbeat, Peter's eyes dart toward the ceiling.

"No costume?" Tony prompts him conversationally. He circles the room and picks up a dusty elmwood cane propped against a corner. "May I?" he asks belatedly.

It all happens so swiftly after that that Peter can never be sure if he replied or not. One moment, Tony has a brow arched at him in expectation, and then the next, the detective is prodding the loose slat in the ceiling with the end of the cane and a mass of maroon and navy fabric hurtles onto the top of his head.

Tony reaches up and peels the rumpled costume from his face. "Flannel," he says mildly. "Just as I suspected."

"That is not a costume, that is a, that's a--" Peter has one hand out, a swarm of bees in his throat. A beat of silence drops between them. "Right. Er. That's a costume."

Tony sifts the pile of cloth in his hands, and a pair of industrial goggles, not unlike a small version of those worn by ship welders, slips out onto his palms. Tony's face lights with childlike glee and he presses the lenses to his face. "Are these more of a decorative or practical function, then? Can you see in them--?"

" _Yes_ , yes, yes I can," Peter stutters, springing forward to snatch the entire pile from Tony's hands. "I can--I can see in them. Could we just--what's--"

Tony levels him a look. "So you are the rooftop-capering vigilante."

"I do not, I do not caper."

"Chimney tumbler."

"You have me mistaken for Santa Claus, Mr. Stark."

"Very well. Wall-crawler?"

"No. Sir."

"Jungle swinger?"

"Just--Arachnoman is fine."

Tony blinks. "I--I beg your pardon. _Arachno_ man? Lordy, you suffer the same linguistic disease as poor Rhodey downstairs. It's a pity he does not allow me to write the catchphrase on his calling cards, or he would be far, far more popular."

Peter serves him a glare that only succeeds in mimicking Dummy's most piteous outbursts as a puppy. "The name is still in development."

"How then about this, if you so wish to uphold the arachnid brand: Spider-Man."

Peter wrinkles his nose.

"Crime-Fighting Spider? Spider-Boy?"

"Spider- _Man_ ," Peter stresses. "Look now--Mr. Stark, why have you really come here?"

Tony thumps the cane once on the wooden floor and matches Peter's gaze with a contemplative one. "Truly, it was to make you an offer. An educational one. Though not of the more, shall we say, orthodox nature."

Peter cards a hand through his hair. "Go on, sir."

"With just a cursory perusal of this room, my keen skills of observation tell me the map above your mattress serves more than a mere decorative purpose. You have been marking the coordinates of specific crimes you must believe to be interconnected. Drawing from my own repertoire, which is a privilege afforded me by my occasional partnership with Sheriff Hogan, I can conclude those are the locations of various explosions that have taken place in warehouses. Under your pillow I see the corner of a package, most likely where you collect your sundry evidence. The notebook you are guarding so tightly with your left arm"--Peter shifts guiltily at this--"Can be none other than the notebook where you keep a summary of your findings. Indeed. You are on to something, Mr. Parker. A connection."

"Illegal arms manufacture," Peter admits.

Tony sniffs and nods. "As I'd suspected from the scant news reports. What have you discovered outside the papers?"

Peter swallows. "Some names. Like...someone who goes by Toomes. And a few faces. It's...slow work."

"Hm. Yes. For someone of your routine and time constraints."

"I have...homework," Peter says faintly.

Good Lord, Tony thinks. He rolls a look toward the ceiling. "Heaven help me pretend I did not just hear you say that." He sets the cane aside and takes the liberty of plopping down on the boy's mattress. "I will say, your deductive skills are not shabby for your age. Your physical abilities, meanwhile...unparalleled. And your apparent passion for fighting crime in these tender years of your adolescence would outclass that of even the most ardent policeman."

Peter shifts from foot to foot. Tony pats the spot on the bed next to him, and Peter sinks down there warily.

"Tell me, Peter, why do you do this?"

The boy visibly startles at the sound of his first name. "How did you find me? How do you know my name?"

"Ah-ah. My methods are my own to keep, and yours to marvel at."

"This is only slightly disturbing," Peter remarks.

Tony sighs. "In due time, then, I will share my sleuthing process. But first...I would like to know your motives. The impetus that drives you from bed in the morning. Your modus operandi."

"Um." Peter twiddles his thumbs. A visible tremor passes once below the surface of his skin. "One day I simply...woke up with a realization. That, that evil happens in this world. And if evil happens, and you have the power to do something and yet you do nothing, then...the evil happened because of you."

Tortured hero complex, Tony notes to himself. Hints of a familiar flavor of trauma to revisit at a later date, preferably under friendlier and more voluntary circumstances.

"With great power comes great responsibility," is what the man says instead, in summary.

The boy offers a wordless nod. He is staring at a snag in the knee of his trousers, as if making eye contact with the man now will prod the rest of his deep, dark secrets to come tumbling out to this stranger at three in the afternoon on a flattened mattress.

"Well." Tony slaps Peter's knee in affected joviality. "I come to you with a proposal. Come work for me."

"Work for--" The boy's head jerks up. "For you? For what?"

"Help me solve this case of illegal weaponry. I may have the brainpower and logical rigor to piece together facts--which is not to say you possess no mental acuity of your own--but you have access to spaces I am neither familiar with nor agile enough to visit."

"You wish for me to be your eyes and ears," Peter surmises.

Tony wobbles a hand in the air. "Eyes, ears, and brain. I only employ those with an impressive power of observation. Take Rhodey, for example. An upstanding physician on the outside who minds his own business: but a wonderful busybody underneath. He pushed your case onto me. And as I sit here with you, I grow to be glad of it."

Peter rubs at a hangnail on his thumb. "Would there be…?"

"Compensation? Naturally."

"And the hours…"

"After your studies? Without question."

"I will...think about it," Peter says slowly.

Tony springs to his feet at that. "Marvelous! You will adore it. Come to my place tomorrow at half past two, sharp."

Peter opens his mouth to protest, then takes one look at the pure elation in Tony's eyes and returns it with a reluctant little grin of his own. "All right, Mr. Stark. Where shall I find you? Or has Dr. Rhodes prevented you from handing out calling cards, too?"

Tony barks out a laugh at the glimmer of the boy's sass. He claps a hand on Peter's shoulder and gives it a fond squeeze. "You will find us at 221B out in Baker Street. Oh, and whatever you do, please try not to be distracted by the pastries across the street. Our landlady certainly buys far more of them than we could ever finish."

Peter suppresses a tiny laugh as the man squeezes his bicep again. "Mr. Stark, I think you'll soon find my appetite can quite hold its own."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was so RIDICULOUSLY fun to write, I'm downright giddy. Fun fact about me: before I got into writing fanfiction, all i wrote was historical fiction and fantasy with ancient sort of vernacular, so it was extremely nostalgic to get back into that kind of language for this piece. I can't tell you just what kind of silly grin I had on my face while producing this.
> 
> I also made a [Pinterest moodboard](https://www.pinterest.com/kcbarrie/writing-moodboards/the-game-is-afoot/) for this universe because I am 100% That Binch.
> 
> Btw, I really don't intend to add a follow-up to the Toomes thing with any new chapters. I could, however, be cajoled into adding related parts as installments as a series. If, like, you could give me serious mystery ideas or plotting tips because I was not kidding earlier when I said I cannot plot to save my life.
> 
> HOLLER AT ME WILL YA. I LOVE Y'ALL <3 -kaleb
> 
> Muh tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> Muh insta: kc.barrie  
> Muh ko-fi: kalebbarrie
> 
> EDIT: I lied. I'm continuing this and it's probably gonna be a 4-parter. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	2. A Dip in the Hudson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reluctantly, Rhodey moves to the staircase down the hallway and presses a panel in the carved wood below the stairs to pop open a cabinet. He retrieves a leather workbelt from inside and tosses it to Peter, who catches it with a wide-eyed and boyish delight before schooling his face into something more neutral.
> 
> “Lock picks, skeleton keys, a small dagger, various small contraptions and gizmos to cause non-lethal explosions and distractions,” Rhodey explains. “I hope you know how to use half of those. And you, Tony. I hope you have a plan.”
> 
> “I always do, beary bear,” Tony says sweetly. “And if experience proves anything for us, everything will go accordingly.”
> 
> Everything does not, in fact, go accordingly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 7k typed on my phone. My insanity knows no bounds.
> 
> A huge thanks to @notapartytrick for her infectious enthusiasm, solid plotting support and vast knowledge of Victorian era fashion. Couldn't have done it without you, truly.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: description of a near drowning.
> 
> ...on that note, enjoy??

When Peter finally locates number 221B on Baker Street (more by following that tantalizing aroma of pastries than anything else), the door swings open at his first knock and his ears are assaulted by two dogs howling in tandem.

“You’ll have to excuse their hypervigilance,” says the lady at the door with a graceful smile. “They have been well-trained to protect their masters. You must be Mr. Parker. I am Miss Potts, landlady of the place.”

The boy exchanges the necessary pleasantries with her behind a tight-lipped smile, bouncing awkwardly on the balls of his feet, more tongue-tied by her towering height and commanding presence than anything else. Miss Potts’ face creases in a smirk of understanding mingled with mirth, and she simply shoos the terriers behind her skirts and holds the door open wider for Peter to come in. 

A second later, a chair squeaks and none other than Mr. Stark’s head pops out around the nearest doorway. “Neither early nor tardy, simply on the dot. A skill well-placed if one is to master the art of never drawing attention to himself. Dummy, stop licking his boots, I will not be tossing you or You a coin for your antics.”

The larger terrier whines in protest but heels, obeying.

Miss Potts leans into the study--for that is apparently what the room is, underneath the teeming layers of books and globes and dying houseplants and unidentifiable experiments--and clears her throat pointedly. “I’ll be bringing in some tea and refreshments, then, since Mr. Parker’s arrival should forebode some normalcy at last.”

“I would not be so hasty in such a conclusion,” Rhodey grumbles, sweeping in through the front door behind Miss Potts and hanging up his top hat and peeling off his gloves in the same motion. “Tony, you must know here and now I fully expect you not to be infecting Peter with your irresponsible habits.”

“Irresponsible?” Peter pipes up, before he can help himself. “I, I have heard all about the--about the great Mr. Stark and his...” At the curve of Tony’s eyebrow, Peter suddenly realizes the hot flush rising to his face. He coughs into his fist. “...Unconventional methods.”

“Lovely way of putting it,” Rhodey relents with a chuckle. He places a hand on either of Peter’s shoulders and steers the boy to a nearby armchair and points to it. Peter eyes it warily, only sinking down with hesitancy when Tony gestures to him to get on with it. At that moment, Miss Potts sweeps back in with her tray of food, and Peter springs back up to his feet.

“Sit down, Mr. Parker,” Miss Potts laughs without even turning around. Even more flushed, Peter stumbles backwards and falls into the chair again.

“You can--you can call me Peter. Miss Potts.”

The woman leans over to regard him with warmth in her eyes. She brushes a stray ginger curl from her brow with the back of her hand. “And you may call me Pepper.” With her gaze still trained on the boy, she says to the two men behind her, “Oh, I like this one, boys. Play nice. No corrupting him.”

Rhodey flits his gaze back and forth between Tony and Pepper with narrowed eyes. He snaps his paper shut. “Tony, a word.”

Tony removes the clay pipe from his mouth--where it has somehow materialized between the beginning of the conversation and now--and puffs a cloud of smoke in Rhodey’s direction. “Knowing you, dear Jim, it’ll be more like two.”

“Hallway, Tony. Now.”

The detective kicks his chair back from the desk with an audible grumble and follows Rhodey out of the study, one hand nonchalantly in his pocket.

“Anthony, I will be frank with you.”

“Have you ever been anything but?”

“Tony. If you are planning what I think it is you are planning with the boy, I won’t have it.”

“And what precisely _do_ you think it is I am planning?”

“I am a bit vague on the details, but the way you look at him tells me enough of the mischief you have intended.”

Tony seems about to protest, but then he lifts his brow and wobbles his head from side to side in concession. “I do like this new tone you’ve adopted, Rhodey. One would think you were the real theater boy between the two of us.”

“Tony. Be serious.”

“I am. Perfectly.”

“You cannot expect to throw him into the kinds of cases we deal with on the daily.”

“No one ever spoke of throwing anyone into anything. Though perhaps a dip in the Hudson would be a nice introduction for him. Crime always lurks by the rivers and sewers.”

Rhodey practically stomps his foot and levels Tony with a fiery stare. “I saw you fall fifty feet from a tower and I could do almost nothing to save you, Tony. You are a man, or approximately something thereabouts. He is a boy.”

“He is a brilliant young man with the mental and physical skills we need on our team.”

“I recall just yesterday it was you proclaiming that he is, indeed, ‘an infant’.”

“A wise man changes his mind four times a day. The evolution of our humanity is ever in motion.”

“I will slap you with my glove, so help me God.”

“Fine, fine!” Tony exclaims. “Would you have me put him on desk duty?”

The two men stand toe to toe now, breaths intermingling. Rhodey lets out a huff and straightens after a pause. “That wouldn’t be a shabby idea.”

“Marvelous. I shall inform him straightaway of his riveting new responsibilities.”

“He can learn much from cataloging your cases. God knows even Pepper could not wrangle you into any semblance of organization.”

Tony chews on the end of his pipe. “If I needed a secretary, Rhodes, I would have whistled down the street and called over that Irish blacksmith’s girl. Friday, or what’s her name. She is more than capable.”

Rhodey rolls his eyes. “He is not a _secretary_ , he is an intern.”

“Oh-ho, yes. An intern for a detective who has been swinging around at night to detect and yet when he comes to work for two detectives, does no detecting. With his intelligence, our young Mr. Parker will become most proficient in detecting dust motes and rat excrement in no time. Splendid. Why did I not think of it sooner. Truly, you are a godsend, James Rhodes, I must retire and hand over full control of the business to you at once.”

“I am going back for my glove,” Rhodey seethes.

“Very well, very well. Would it make you foam less at the mouth if I lent him the case of the traveling bicycle?”

“You already solved that at three in the morning. I know, because you woke me with your little gong to announce it.”

“Well, the boy doesn’t have to know that,” Tony hisses at him. “You forced my hand.”

“Fine,” says Rhodey.

“Fine,” says Tony.

“That is acceptable.”

“This is excellent.”

“That was all I asked.”

“Shall we go back in?” Tony opens an imaginary door and gestures Rhodey in with a sweeping bow. Rhodey rolls his eyes and steps inside. The two men pause on the threshold of the study when they notice both Pepper and Peter standing in the midst of Tony’s unwashed beakers, Pepper with her arms folded and Peter wearing a hole into his cap with his fidgeting hands in front of him. No doubt remains in either man’s mind that the two inside the study heard every word that was exchanged in the hallway.

Peter scrunches his face as if just catching a taste of the tension between Tony and Rhodey and finding it akin to a lemon. “If we are all for candidness, sir...I solved the matter of the traveling bicycle two days ago. I found it and returned it to its rightful owner.”

Tony stares at him a moment, slack-jawed. The clay pipe slips out and the man just barely catches it with one hand. He turns to address Rhodey with affected casualness. “Brilliant, I tell you. And the _physicality_ to find, to pursue, to serve justice.”

Even the manner in which the air leaves Rhodey’s lungs sounds unimpressed. “You mean he walks and you don’t.”

Tony breezes past his colleague and flops down on the dusty settee. “Miss Potts. I do so appreciate you withholding judgment at this time. I believe I shall be adjusting my will to include...say...twelve percent of Rhodey’s portion, reserved for you.”

“I’m flattered,” says Pepper, and promptly scoops up her teacup and leaves the room.

\--

“The watch.”

“Pawned by the maid.”

“The dog that no longer knew how to sit.”

“Dog-sitting gone awry. The original dog died in an unfortunate accident, but the friend was terrified of telling the truth. And so he switched them.”

“Fair, though that one required little sleuthing. Ghost with the seven fingers?”

“Her formerly betrothed, seeking to wreak havoc on her new relationship.”

“Interesting proposal. Not a hallucination born of stress and guilt?”

Peter shuffles through the rest of the sheaf in his hands and tosses it into the rightmost pile on his side of the desk. “No, Mr. Stark,” he says, glancing up. “Doctors may be prone to diagnoses of ‘feminine hysteria,’ but I happen to remember there was a witness at the shipyard who claimed to see the same silhouette. With reports of mass drowning at sea, it was easy for the man to ascertain there was a death certificate in his name. And from there, it was a matter of biding his time and playing his haunting game.”

“Hmm.” Tony fiddles with another string on his violin, only succeeding in running it more out of tune. “Your stutter disappears when you are exercising your brain. Intriguing.”

“Thanks,” says Peter with a dry look.

Tony shifts to lean on his side of the desk with a grunt. He taps the ash from his pipe onto the tray in the corner. “Five days with me and I already see the confidence blooming. I was beginning to fear for a moment that you would forever regard me as though struck by stars.”

“No need,” Peter quips lightly. “All I needed was to converse with Dr. Rhodey properly and then I knew who you truly were.”

“Debatable,” Tony huffs. “So has your aunt said anything about your internship?”

Peter’s head jerks up in surprise, perhaps at the fact that a man like Tony might be so freely seeking the opinion or approval of a widow like May. But then understanding falls over his face. Considering the few and brief interactions he has witnessed between Tony and Pepper, it is clear the man is a respecter of neither gender nor race. He subjects all to his tortuous banter without discrimination.

“She is satisfied that the pay has alleviated our living situation,” Peter admits. “But she cannot help but notice how my short time with you has turned me ‘brooding’ and ‘morbid’.”

Tony scoffs. “You, brooding? Morbid? I suppose she must dine with us sometime and know me for the true Dracula that I am, then.”

“To be fair, I never spoke to her before of true crime. My employment with you now allows me to.”

Tony lifts a brow, regarding the boy more pensively. “As a pretext for unloading the burdens of crime you see during your night patrols,” he fills in for Peter. “You have not told her anything of your vigilante activities.”

“No, no, n-no, of course not,” Peter hastens to say. “If she knew, I would be--she would be heartbroken. And I would be flayed alive, probably. Metaphorically. Or not.”

The man’s eyes narrow infinitesimally over the table at the boy. Tony picks up one of his many magnifying glasses and tightens the screw in the handle for want of something to fidget with. “So the emotional scope of the crime that has personally motivated you toward vigilantism extends to Mrs. Parker, as well.”

Peter brushes the cuff of his sleeve over his nose. He shifts uncomfortably. 

“My uncle--May’s husband--was a policeman,” Peter says finally in a low voice. “Benjamin Parker.”

In the swing of the pause in Peter’s words, Tony hums in acknowledgment. “I don’t know the name personally, but Sheriff Hogan likely does. He used to patrol the streets in Queens.”

Peter nods. He licks his lips. “He died last April. Shot by a--trying to--shot by a thief.”

Tony abruptly ceases fiddling with the magnifying glass. Six months past. It was six months ago, too, that Spider-Man was first sighted on the rooftops.

The man clears his throat and sniffs. “‘If evil happens and you did nothing to stop it, then the evil happened because of you’,” he quotes softly. He wonders what else the boy is not telling him, though from the fleeting look of torture in his eyes he can hazard a guess.

A lock of Peter’s unruly waves falls into the boy’s eyes. He peers up at Tony through his cowlick, wide-eyed, searching. “Is that why you went into the private detective business?”

Tony pokes his tongue into his cheek and twists his mouth. The boy misinterprets his expression and tacks on: “Sorry, s-sorry--didn’t mean to be presumptuous--I thought we were, we were having a moment here…”

Tony flashes him a crease of a smile. “So was I, until I was reminded by your endearing stammer why we discuss cases only and never feelings in this office.”

“I overstepped, Mr. Stark. I apologize.”

“Not my implication at all, Pete. I was the one who asked. Or rather--concluded, in quite a forward manner, your motives for becoming Spider-Man.” Tony picks up a shredded piece of paper and flicks it at the nearest window. “I am not known for curbing my tongue. ‘Volatile,’ on the contrary, yes, that appears often in my professional recommendations. ‘Self-absorbed.’ ‘Does not play well with others’...”

Peter eyes him for a long moment, and then speaks up meekly, “For what it’s worth, Mr. Stark, I rather think Dr. Rhodey and Miss Potts enjoy living with you. Precisely because of those...traits you mentioned.” He coughs. “Which are...without a doubt exaggerated.” He scratches the bridge of his nose this time. “Sorry.”

“How you do suck the fun out of apologizing by overusing the very word,” says Tony. “Now I won’t be able to say it to you, for fear of turning this into a tearfest. Quite ridiculous.”

A flicker of a smile tugs at the corner of Peter’s mouth. “We can agree, then. I say _sorry_ enough for the both of us.”

“Indeed.”

“Sorry.”

Tony rolls him a look over the top of his spectacles.

“...Duly noted, Mr. Stark.”

The two hold each other’s gaze for some seconds longer, mouths twitching, until the moment passes. Neither one is particularly skilled at expressing emotions--their various and eventful instances of miscommunication over the past five days are enough evidence thereof--but for the weight of an instant they both feel with blinding certainty that they are on the same page. _Sorry for asking about your past, Mr. Stark_ ; and in return, _No, sorry for prying into your pain, my boy_. And perhaps they know it won’t be the last time, but they are beginning to make their peace with it.

Tony clears his throat and gathers up a final stack of papers for Peter to sift through. “Returning to the subject of your internship. Pay is not generous at the Flushing Hospital, am I correct?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Stark, my aunt and I are rolling in gold.”

Tony flicks a newspaper in the boy’s direction. The flurry of movement hides his grin. 

“They are always in need of nurses who can take more hours,” Peter explains, on a more serious note. “It’s not often we see each other during the winter, when there are more patients and she takes many of the night watches in the children’s ward.”

“Still, it must be a challenge, for a single woman in these times, with the preposterous wages and with your...beloved uncle gone.”

Peter presses his mouth into a thin line. “We make do.”

“If there is anything I can do--”

“I will let you know, Mr. Stark.”

“I do not jest. Anything at all. I am a man of many wants, but few are my needs. If you find yourself in any--”

“I swear on my dead mother’s soul, Mr. Stark--”

“How invigorating to hear you bring out the orphan jokes.”

“I mean it. If you try to give me anymore money, I’ll, I'll…”

“...Bang on my door at midnight and, when I come to the threshold, what--apologize?”

“ _No_ ,” Peter says with a hot flush. “It’s not fair, it’s not right, I would never ask you to do that.”

“But it _is_ fair and it _is_ right, and I know that because I am the adult talking.”

Peter’s entire face puffs out into a frown, and Tony would burst into full-bellied laughter at the boy’s resemblance to an actual boxer or a little hound if not for his suspicion that that would only incense him further.

“I don’t even know where you get all this money,” Peter grouses. “Are there really that many noble geriatric clients who come knocking at your door in fear for their lives?”

“On the contrary,” says Rhodey’s dry voice at the doorway, “Tony here invents things. And sells them.”

Peter cranes his neck backward over the top of his chair to look at the doctor. 

“I know,” says Rhodey with a roguish grin. “I remain as stupefied as you are that anyone in their right mind could have more confidence in his contraptions than his detecting. And throw down good money for it.”

Tony puffs a ring of smoke at his best friend’s face. “I’ll have you know, if I can train Dummy here to fetch me a glass of perfect Scotch, there is still hope for those ‘flying death machines’ of mine to take off from the ground.”

Hearing his name and taking his cue, the Welsh terrier scrambles to his feet with an inquisitive warble and trots over with a small glass balanced on his snout.

Rhodey brings the glass to his nose and gags. “That is formaldehyde.”

“That does explain the strange smell on Mr. Stark all day,” Peter muses.

Tony waves a hand at them both. “Worse things have entered my body.”

Peter stares at him. “That is...profoundly reassuring.”

Rhodey eyes them both, as if uncertain whether the unfortunate blasé tone of Tony’s vernacular has begun to rub off on the intern or not. He taps his cane on the carpet. “Well, you had better be sure your innards are not currently being embalmed, because you’ll need your energy, Tony.”

That catches the other man’s attention. He sets down his pipe and sits at attention. “Movement on the chess board.”

“Yes.”

“A pawn has made a move. A little bird told you something?”

Rhodey nods. “Hefty bribes, to take a barge with undisclosed cargo up the Hudson.”

“Wonderful. The game is afoot.” Tony springs to his feet. “We’re going on an adventure.”

Peter cuts himself off in the middle of getting up from his chair. “Am I--am I coming on the adventure?”

“No,” says Rhodey, at the same moment that Tony crows, “Yes!”

“ _No_ ,” says Rhodey. “We need you to do an important job, and that is to log every single detail we report back to you. It is essential.”

“But--”

“Oh, you are being a sourpuss,” says Tony. “He’s coming. This is a breakthrough in the Toomes case, after all.”

Rhodey wavers, glancing between the two of them.

“I can...stay behind,” Peter says, sounding as if the very words are like coals in his mouth. He fidgets where he stands.

“Nonsense. Rhodey, fetch him a kit. Three is delightful company.”

“I don’t feel good about this,” Rhodey warns him.

“I can be--I can be backup,” Peter offers.

Tony points back at him. “You heard the fellow. Backup.”

“Tony, he’s not--he is not backup.”

“Well, then, he is certainly not a stowaway,” Tony scoffs. He leans closer and lowers his voice. “I am at the end of my patience, Jim. Have faith in him. Had you not known the face behind the mask, would you have more trust in his abilities?”

Rhodey heaves a sigh. “His age is information I cannot just black out in my mind, Tony.”

“Oh. Hm. Well.” Tony pats Rhodey on both shoulders with a tight smile. “It seems you will have to in the next three minutes, because I am leaving and Peter is coming with me. Cheer up, Jimmy. If I could black out my entire existence from the nineties, then you will do just fine.”

Reluctantly, Rhodey moves to the staircase down the hallway and presses a panel in the carved wood below the stairs to pop open a cabinet. He retrieves a leather workbelt from inside and tosses it to Peter, who catches it with a wide-eyed and boyish delight before schooling his face into something more neutral.

“Lock picks, skeleton keys, a small dagger, various small contraptions and gizmos to cause non-lethal explosions and distractions,” Rhodey explains. “I hope you know how to use half of those. And you, Tony. I hope you have a plan.”

“I always do, beary bear,” Tony says sweetly. “And if experience proves anything for us, everything will go accordingly.”

\--

Everything does not, in fact, go accordingly.

The expedition does begin pleasantly enough, with Tony even whistling a show tune under his breath as the three of them wait in the shadows behind an array of oil barrels on the docks. The man only pauses to give Peter's woefully inadequate outfit a once-over and drape one of his coats around the boy's shoulders. For once, the boy seems incapable of resisting the detective's discomfiting generosity, due to the sheer distraction of having to rub his hands up and down his arms under his flimsy floater shirt and cotton coat.

The instant the lapping of the water at the dock changes rhythm, Peter tenses. Rhodey picks up on the lad's shift in body language and straightens himself, stamping out his cigar. The three of them peer round the side of the barrel, first Peter, then Tony with the most mischief-stricken expression of concentration, and finally Rhodey above the two of them looking about halfway between lecturing someone or falling asleep on his feet.

"If my calculations serve me well--as they have for decades--they will dock here for a respite. Our goal is to ascertain how many they are, slip onboard, find the precious cargo and note down the type and quantity. Once we have a certain report, I can tip off Hogan and he can telegram his connections upstate to head off the boat farther north with handcuffs and batons."

"That's more of a plan than I have ever heard you explain in twenty years," Rhodey concedes with a grumble. 

"Wait, wait--" Peter interjects. "We are not going to--stop them?"

Tony glances down at him. In this angle in the moonlight, the lad's face is pale and judging and distressingly young.

"Stop them?" the detective repeats.

Peter swallows but barrels on. "I was under the impression that is why you have brought me along. To be the muscle."

"Peter--" Rhodey starts.

"I would like to think of our distribution of duties as more akin to a triumvirate," Tony quibbles. "But if you wish to be the muscles and I am to be the brains, then I suppose that would leave Rhodey being the tongue that never ceases to wag."

"Tony," the other man snaps, in unconscious illustration of Tony's very point.

Tony swivels his head to look up at Rhodey with a charming smile. "You know I jest. But our dear fellow has a point. I am well-versed in the martial arts of the East; you are a decorated veteran from abroad; and Peter here has extensive and enthusiastic experience in his...rooftop romps."

"I do not romp," Peter whines.

"You insisted it was not capering."

"Gentleman, to attention," Rhodey hisses. "Here they come. Off the cuff I can discern five. No, six. There is another seated behind the winch."

"With our usual luck and precision, we tranquilize the two that are first in our line of sight. The rest shall be a piece of--a croissant, yes."

And so they set off the instant the barge has moored and the captain has debarked, leaving the other men milling about in various directions.

Peter pauses in awe at the deadly efficiency with which Rhodey slips past the burliest seaman, grabs a sackcloth from atop the piled netting and shoves it over the brute's head, and Tony springs over and jabs a syringe into the throbbing vein in his neck before their victim can even begin to holler. The two detectives make quick work of the second seaman that whirls around at the commotion: Tony sweeps off his second jacket and Rhodey grabs it by the collar, winding the sleeves around the seaman's neck and across his nostrils while Tony plunges the second syringe into him.

"Lighter on the seams next time," Tony complains. "That is my favorite walking jacket."

Something rustling catches the corner of Peter's eye. Up ahead, Tony is beckoning at him with a jerk of his head to tiptoe past the cabin and head down into the hold. Something in Peter's stomach lurches, crawls. He wobbles on his feet, hesitating. And then he makes his split-second decision and breaks out into a tiptoeing run in the opposite direction with a wildly apologetic glance backward.

The shadow he glimpsed suddenly shifts, and then it's there in front of him, looming, seething, an unending mass of muscle and riverside stench. Peter has no time to dwell on the army of ants crawling in the pit of his stomach or crowding his throat. He tilts into a crouch and races straight at the sailor in a bullheaded tackle.

The momentum of his attack, combined with the advantage of his compact stature taking his opponent by surprise, tides Peter over for all of ten seconds before the seaman lets out a bellow and flips the boy backward on the stone-hard deck. Starlight explodes behind Peter's eyelids. By instinct, he lashes out in a kick, then latches onto the sailor's fist and propels himself to the side beyond the trajectory of the oncoming blow. The boy flips to his feet, shakes the dizziness from his skull. The sailor swings. He dodges. There's another swing, and another swing, and Peter continues to weave and bob up and down, until the inevitable second when he dodges too late and the punch glances off his cheekbone.

The crack of a gunshot in the echoing night air rattles him to the bone even as Peter goes flying and lands in a pile of rope with the back of his head colliding with the starboard railing. Vaguely he hears more shouts, he recognizes Tony's voice and then Rhodey's, and then another gunshot, and another, and then a nonstop round of fire. Everything is so distant, loud and insistent, in the same stroke that it is distant as if reaching Peter through a mass of cotton.

The next thing he knews, there's a sail collapsing on top of him and no matter how quickly he whips his arm up to shield himself from--from the attack of canvas over him, it is all useless. The seaman is grunting, hollering through the sail. The fabric tightens around him--Peter thrashes and claws for an exit but there is none, there's rope and hands and feet kicking him from all sides, he's being lifted and the rope tightens round his torso. His right arm is pinned to his side.

The chill of a thousand guns pierces Peter all at once in a panic that rocks him to his core. He opens his mouth to scream, to cry. The sound is caught in his throat as if clamped by a vise.

His world swirls. He's lifted--hefted upside down--and tossed into freefall.

The sheer terror of flying in the air is nothing compared to the impact he makes with the water. It is ice and fire at once, slamming the breath from him like the hammer meeting the anvil. It is dark and cold and there is neither up nor down, and the water shoots up his nostrils and mouth and it is cold, cold, _cold_.

Peter is paralyzed. The tales of seeing one's entire life before his eyes before the end are all hogwash, because the ice is in him and upon him like knives and it is all-consuming. He cannot breathe. He cannot think.

 _My God_ , is his last thought before he descends into frenetic madness. _I never meant it to end this way. I never meant to hurt you, May._

\--

Tony is screaming and screaming and he moves like a madman to get to Peter, but the brute behind Tony has his upper arms locked in a chokehold around his neck. Another lungless scream fills Tony's consciousness and it is only when the snap of gunfire yanks him back to reality that he realizes the screaming was all in his head. His mouth is open and his chest heaves in protest against the sky, but never has there left a sound from his mouth.

Rhodey slams the butt of his pistol against the skull of the man choking Tony. The seaman stumbles back, and it's the only opening that Tony needs to whirl, stomp on the sailor's foot, dislocate his knee and deliver a near-lethal chop to the side of his neck. 

Another sailor cocks his gun at Tony's ear. The detective drives the heel of his palm up into his new assailant's nose with one hand and knocks the gun away with his other, cracking the attacker's wrist in the same move. Behind him Rhodey exchanges fire with the last seaman. Judging by the bellow of pain and another round of fire followed by a whimper, Tony already knows the last man has been injured and is down on his knees.

"Peter," Tony breathes. His vocal cords refuse to work.

Rhodey is at his side in a second.

"Peter," Tony says again, and still his throat disobeys him. The other man understands him all the same and grabs him by the shoulder to haul him to the starboard side of the barge.

"He's in the water," Tony hears himself breathe out as if his voice is no longer his own. His next movements are a jumble and a flurry. His waistcoat flies off, buttons popping, then his shirt, and then he's leaping onto the railing and diving headfirst into the river water that slices his skin like death.

He sees him instantly. Peter is a beacon of white canvas against the murky glass waves, immobile and morbid like something from King Tut's sarcophagus. Tony cannot seem to stroke fast enough to reach him. When he does, he clamps his arms around a deadweight, and he kicks and kicks for the surface with the realization simmering below the threshold of horror in him that he hardly breathed enough before diving in.

Blessedly, miraculously, Rhodey is there. There is a rope and pressure and the disorienting rising from the arctic chill into the blast of night air like a punch to Tony's lungs.

"On the dock, on the dock," Tony murmurs like a mantra.

They have Peter laid out and the sail unwrapped from his body in no time, but to Tony it is an eternity. His hands shake too direly for him to even attempt any compression on the boy's chest. Rhodey, silent and level-headed, takes over. Tony collapses on his hands and knees to crawl over to Peter's head and slap his pallid cheeks.

"Peter," he says sharply. His voice has returned to him, and never has it sounded more sacrilegious than a time like this. "Peter. Wake up. C'mon, boy. Breathe. _Breathe_."

Peter does not stir. Even the ends of his lashes stand frozen and unmoving. Tony's ribs clench and he finds himself screaming this time with all the air he never possessed five minutes before when it could have made a difference. He grasps the boy by the shoulders as though possessed by demons and shakes him, _shakes_ him, even as Rhodey's voice filters through that he has to let him lie. And Tony cries out Peter's name again and again and yet again, more times than he can count, more times than he ever thought he would for a mere lad he took a fancy to five days ago and never knew he just might be willing to die for.

With a final blow to the boy's chest from Rhodey's palm, a spray of water shoots from Peter's mouth and his eyes slam open. His lungs suck in air with the sound of a dying man.

" _Peter_ ," Tony chokes out. And never has the sound of that name or the wheeze and rattle in the boy's chest sounded more like heaven. Before he can control himself, he is already gathering the lad in his arms and crushing him to his chest.

"Gentle now," Rhodey murmurs. The sigh leaves him in a little whoosh, and that one gesture tells them all just how much he, too, feared that they just might have brought back a child from the dead.

\--

Pepper steps out of the room in a crinkle of skirts and a nearly imperceptible quiver to her hand that bears the night candle.

Tony is the first to spring to his feet from his chair in the hallway. "His condition?"

"The worst is behind him," Pepper assures him. Something behind the blue of her eyes is just as foreign and wild and nameless as his own, but neither mention it.

"He is sleeping?"

"Soundly. He needed no help breathing when I left him. I stayed a few minutes longer to assure myself--you and me both--that he was truly asleep with no problems."

Tony sags. If he could throw himself into her arms at this moment, he would. A beat later, he says as much.

Pepper tosses him a tired little smile of tolerance and exasperation. "And spoil your reputation as the emotionless machine of logic? I quite think you've had enough upheaval for one night."

"I mean no insincerity. My thanks to you, Miss Potts."

"And mine to you," Rhodey adds at his side.

Pepper shakes his head. "You averted the worst, doctor. I simply provided the bed."

At that, Rhodey turns to Tony in remembrance. "Did you get the message to his aunt of his whereabouts?"

"No need to cause her alarm just yet," Tony mutters. "She is on the night watch in Flushing even as we speak. The boy will be right as rain by morning, and all well put behind us."

"I assure you, these things are not buried as seamlessly as you think," Pepper says cryptically. She pins both men with a singular look, before she straightens with a sigh and picks up her skirts. "It grows late, gentlemen. After tonight's excitement, you must rest. This bag-eyed vigil will do you no good. Peter will wake in the morning, just as you said."

"One more peep at him," says Tony.

Pepper rolls him a look. "Rest was not a suggestion, Mr. Stark."

"In a moment. Thank you, once more, light of my life, lamp of my soul."

Pepper appears to want to parry his flattery, but thinks better of it and turns instead with a nod at both men. She disappears down the hall toward the sitting room with a bob of her candle and the swish of her crinoline on the floor.

"I will not hear 'I told you so,'" Tony says, the moment Miss Potts has vanished round the corner.

Rhodey does not respond for a long moment. Tony glances up at him. His best friend stares back with a recondite expression.

"As you wish," says Rhodey. The turn of his tone is equally peculiar.

Tony twists his torso upward in his chair to regard Rhodey more closely. "Tonight has worn the cantankerous old fellow from you like a charm."

"On the contrary," Rhodey says softly, "I needn't employ it on you tonight. Not after what I witnessed."

Tony huffs. Drops his gaze to the floor. "You speak in riddles."

"I speak plainly enough, Tony. I know what I saw. You care about the boy."

"I was afraid he had drowned," Tony snaps. "Contrary to popular belief, Jimmy, I am not a narcissistic psychopath."

Rhodey hums. "I never for a second took you for one. But don't deny it, Tony, you know as well as I we are equally quick-witted. I have been your companion for decades and there is little left in you that could fool me."

Tony squirms but offers no rebuttal this time. He unhooks his braces and draws a trembling hand down his face. He speaks from behind his palm, unwilling to meet Rhodey's gaze for what he will utter next. "He truly could have died, Rhodes. I thought--I did not--no. It was unreal. One moment of cheer and good fun blurred into the greatest horror of my life."

"You saved him," Rhodey reminds him, to soften the blow.

Tony's lungs shudder. "Only barely. He is fourteen, Jim. Fourteen. How was I blind before-- _fourteen_ , for Christ Almighty. A child." His voice hitches and cracks.

Rhodey's hand, ever warm and grounding, comes down to rest on his shoulder. "I know, Tones. I know."

"He must be taken off the case," Tony concludes with a sniff.

"I don't disagree."

"I am sending him back to his aunt in the morning, straightaway. No. He cannot be involved in this. He cannot--cannot be involved with _us_ , with _me_."

"Tony…"

"My mind has been made up. Without a doubt it is for his well-being. The payments will continue, but I will not send for him until all is done and clear."

Rhodey's mouth folds into a line. He nods once. "I leave it to you."

Tony takes this moment now to reach up and squeeze Rhodey's hand where it has not left his shoulder. "I owe you my life as much as his."

The ghost of a smile manifests in Rhodey's voice. "Oh, but there is nothing new there, _old sport_."

"Remind me in a week's time to slaughter you at cribbage and send a slanderous note to your grandmother."

\--

Waking for Peter feels akin to dying, an unfortunate comparison he is now able to make with certainty because of his brush with Hades just the night before.

The groan leaves him before his eyelids drag open. The next thing he knows, there is light stabbing his line of vision and a swirl of shadows in his periphery. He jackknifes upright, only to sway and tilt backward again in a wave of nausea.

"Steady on the movements, little rabbit," says Tony from the corner. "You've been down for the count."

Peter makes no reply, instead concentrating on keeping his mouth shut and breathing in and out through his nostrils. Once the sickness has passed, he cracks open an eye again to absorb his surroundings. He has never seen the mint green paper or the gold foil fleur de lys on the walls before. The quilt that comes up to his chest is feather-light and silky.

"Courtesy of the kind Miss Virginia," Tony explains with a clear of his throat. "She is coming in a moment with soup, no doubt, but for now concentrate on gathering your bearings. Water to the lungs and a lump to the noggin? You certainly make an entrance into the business, my boy."

 _My boy_. If Peter were not so discombobulated, he would latch onto the strange new nickname and question it.

Instead, what he says is, "Sorry," in the raspiest voice imaginable under the sun.

Tony's mouth twitches. "Ever true to form, Mr. Parker."

Peter turns over slowly onto his side to address the man better. "Mr. Stark. You saved my life. I don't think I can--I mean I--thank you."

Something raw and disturbed flashes across Tony's face. He arrests it and quells it masterfully. His nose wrinkles in a sniff. "I would do it again for anyone I brought into this. I am just glad you are...alive."

"Thank you," Peter whispers again. And that is that.

The chair creaks then with the sudden shift of Tony getting to his feet. He approaches the bed with a discernible limp, and as he draws nearer Peter catches a glimpse of bruises along his right temple. Tony reaches forward, hesitates, and finally squeezes the lad's shoulder.

"I am sending you home later today," Tony days at last. "Surely our fine and patient Mrs. Parker will be wondering after your whereabouts. And take some days off to recuperate. Tell her what you will, but--no. Make it a week. Two weeks. The cheques will still be sent round your residence. One of the smithy's girls, Karen, if not Friday, is my trusted helper in this."

"W-wait," Peter stammers. "What happened last night with the--with the arms? Do we have a report? What shall we do about Toomes?"

Tony glances away, and it's all the confirmation Peter needs to feed the gnawing of anxiety in the pit of his stomach.

"Lay your mind at ease about the Toomes case," Tony says. "I have it handled."

"But, Mr. Stark, we started out with--"

"Now, now, the adult is talking." Tony's face creases with the most pained of smiles. "Leave it to us, Pete, you hear? You are--this is me officially pulling you off the case."

"N-no…"

The protests die on Peter's lips with the clatter of Pepper's arrival with the breakfast tray. At Peter's side, Tony's gaze flits to him an instant before swerving away. The moment hangs between them in a swirl of unnamed emotion, of too many things left unspoken, and Peter sits there with the weight of Tony's hand on his shoulder and the sting of worthlessness behind his eyes and chest.

"I will...leave you to it," Tony says awkwardly. "Eat up, Pete. I'll be having Rhodey escort you home."

And with that, he and his silent apologies and shaking hands are gone from the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a near freakout from anxiety writing the water scene because I, unfortunately, have personal experience with nearly drowning. (Don't @ me Daisy, you know full well by now all the shite I write is personally inspired)
> 
> What do you think will happen next?? Is Tony an idiot or is he an idiot? What say you about the reference to Peter falling into a lake in Hoco? Thoughts? Predictions? Emojis?? FEED ME PLS THANK YOU AND I LOVE YOU <3 -kaleb


	3. Kindness and Bravery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boy leaps and latches onto the side of the ship. He scrabbles for purchase--nearly slides half a foot down, and the next bullet lodges in the wood a centimeter from his temple. Heart beating in his throat now, he hauls his weight upward and scrambles up the side with the force of an adrenaline he never knew he possessed. The next thing he knows, he is on his side on the unfinished poop deck, and Toomes is firing round after round up through the railing toward his chest.
> 
> Mind racing, Peter tries a new tactic. “Just give up, Toomes!” he yells down. He loathes the tremor in his voice. “The police already know you’re here, and they will be arriving at any moment now.”
> 
> “Well, then, all the more reason we had better end this, once and for all,” Toomes bellows, and he lets loose another rain of bullets.
> 
> Peter springs back and presses himself under cover. “Well, that backfired,” he mutters. “Christ, how many guns _does_ he have?”  
> \--  
> Peter stumbles on a breakthrough in the Toomes case and, quite stupidly but predictably, raids the shipyard on his own to stop the shipment of arms. Tony has the heart attack of his life commandeering a horse to rescue his intern.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for brief mentions of blood, various injuries, gunfire and action.
> 
> I'm so chuffed at your positive reactions to the last two chapters, folks. Your support always puts a happy grin on my face for days. I would never have been inspired to keep writing this period AU without you!!
> 
> That being said, strap in for some action and whump, and I hope you enjoy :D

May is tense as a string in her rocking chair when Peter pushes open the door of their residence with a creak. Her head whips up, curls flying, her hair down in a rare display of her anxiety. In a flash she’s up on her feet and checking over Peter, eyes darting from his face to his hands to his feet, and her own fingers hovering over his shoulders.

“Where have you been?” she demands. “Are you all right? Where have you _been_?”

“May, May, I’m fine, I am fine, perfectly all right.” Peter raises his hands to knock hers away from his face, but she persists, solicitously checking every inch of him.

“Where were you?”

Peter opens his mouth to let slip the lie he’s had prepared. It would be easy, to move his mouth and say that he was at school but came down with some unknown illness and so was sent home, and to say that all he wants is to lie down and sleep it off--but one look at the spark of fury in May’s eyes is enough to make his mouth snap shut again. 

“I was at…”

“School? You were at school? That is a load of horse piss.” May is, almost imperceptibly, shaking. “Your books were at home and your school shoes by the door. Try again, Peter.”

 _I was drowning. Being pinned down and smothered with a sail and tossed into the goddamn Hudson--I was dying_.

Instead, Peter swallows, dry and painful, and he doesn’t realize the redness and moisture are stinging his eyes until what comes out of his mouth is, “I think I lost the internship with Mr. Stark.”

His confession doesn’t seem to register with May for a long moment. But then when it does, her eyes widen and a pallid haze washes over her face. She covers it masterfully, choosing instead to cup his cheeks with her hands. “How? What’s wrong, Peter? What happened? Are you all right? Start--start from the beginning. Come, come sit. That’s it. Sit down.”

He needs no further prompting. He collapses in a tangle of bones at the kitchen table, and May quickly follows, knotting and unknotting her hands in the folds of her apron. Her fingers twitch as if aching to run them through his damp hair.

“I made a mistake,” Peter mutters at his knees. He sets his elbows on the table with a painful thump and covers his eyes, digs his fingertips into his sockets behind closed lids. He rubs and rubs them as if the explosion of colors there will erase the weight of everything that occurred the previous night.

“I made a mistake,” he says again, and this time his voice shakes. “I...I made the wrong decision and I triggered a setback in the case. One that may have put Mr. Stark and Dr. Rhodes at risk. I lost his...lost Mr. Stark’s trust.”

May plants her hands firmly on his knees. “I am sure that is not true.”

“No--May--It _is_ true, I could see how disappointed he was in me--”

“I could see how much he admired you, Peter, that day he came by to offer you the position. No. No, I know how your mind works, child, you see the best in others and the worst in yourself--”

“Be that as it may, he said he would not send for me for two weeks, at the very least. I--he--” Words begin to fail Peter. “That was a sure sign he no longer has need of my services. I’m sorry, May. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ve failed you.”

“No,” May whispers. Her hands tighten around her nephew’s knees in a white-knuckled grip. “No,” she says again, louder, and reaches forward with desperation in her bones to grab the boy by the back of his neck and bring his head down into her chest. Her dress is drenched immediately with the silent flood of his tears.

“You’ve not failed me,” she murmurs into his hair. It’s damp, smelling musty and aged, but she has no wherewithal to question it now. “C’mon, boy. You haven’t failed me. You--you applied for this position to _help_ us, to help me, when I never asked you to in the first place. There is not a world I can imagine where you, with your kindness and bravery and--and sheer hard work, could disappoint a superior so. Such that he would send you away. No. You must put away this hopelessness. And if it is true after all...that he would retire your services, and is letting you down gently…” May swallows. “It isn’t the end of the world, huh, Peter? We have survived, you and I. Mr. Stark is simply blind to your strengths which I know you possess.”

Peter shakes his head, wet locks bumping May’s chin, and she entertains a fleeting smile at the boyishness of the gesture.

“I never did like that Tony much from the outset, anyway,” she grumbles.

The boy hiccups wetly into her chest.

“You’re freezing,” his aunt notes mildly. “What have you been up to, a stakeout in the rain? I heard there was a storm in the wee hours of the morning like God sneezing all over the Hudson.”

That draws another reluctant giggle from her nephew. “Something like that,” he mumbles. He pulls away at last, swiping furiously at his eyes with the backs of his hands, and May can recognize in less than a heartbeat the flash of despair in him before he pulls on a brave smile for her.

“What you need is some soup, and rest, and light reading to help you fall asleep,” May decides with a hand on her hip and the other on the kitchen table as she glances at him again appraisingly. “Catch up with that--that assignment for your poor English teacher, yes? And maybe the day after tomorrow, when I’ve got my time off, we can dress up and pay Mrs. Leeds and Ned a visit. Cheer us all up after--in light of all this.”

Peter opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. Instead, his head tilts to the side and he fixes May with a stare so intense and unreadable that she startles a little bit. She fiddles with her apron string. “What, Peter? What is it?”

“Nothing,” he says quickly. “I--I love you.”

She never means to melt around him, but something about the boy and his restless presence--vibrating, always moving, yet paradoxically constant in its excitability--always makes her soften around the edges when they confide in each other like this. “I love you too,” she murmurs just as swiftly as he did. “You know that.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, drawing a line across the kitchen table with his thumbnail. “I just wanted to remind you. And...be reminded, I guess.”

The woman can’t help indulging another small upturn of her lips. She pats the top of his head, twice more, and this time lets her hand linger and her fingers run themselves through the knots there as she used to when he was a lad in the grip of a nightmare, in the wake of the disappearance of his birth parents. And he sinks into her touch, light and familiar, grounding, the only thing that could ever make that promise feel real to him that everything, indeed, will be all right.

\--

Despite the wave of relief that falls over Peter at May’s swift forgiveness, he enters his bedroom with heavy footsteps and the taste of pitch in his mouth, a sting of guilt in his chest that will not be so easily extinguished. He shuts the door and lets his head fall back against the slab of wood with a sigh. 

That cryptic, uneasy smile on Tony’s face flashes across his mind. _"Now, now, the adult is talking… Leave it to us, Pete, you hear? You are--this is me officially pulling you off the case."_

Running over the various permutations of Tony’s meaning in his head is just as painful the seventieth time as it is the first, and yet Peter is morbidly drawn to it, helplessly, obsessively. He imagines fleets of different things that the detective must have wanted to say, and yet refrained from doing so out of utter pity for the street rat that was just dragged back half-dead from drowning. _Incompetent. Imbecile. A rash fool. A boy, a boy, a stupid boy_ \--

Peter groans and slaps his hands over his eyes, then his ears, as if the gesture would alleviate the crowding of voices inside his own skull. If only he hadn’t charged the burly sailor--if only he had followed Tony’s signal, if he hadn’t been brash, too overconfident in his physical abilities--if only he had laid aside his goddamn reckless desire to prove himself to the man…

If only. _If only_.

The boy stumbles over to his mattress on the floor and kicks aside the sheets where he left them unmade in his haste to get to school and then to work the day before. How the span of less than twenty-four hours has changed his life, he considers bitterly, and curses himself again for it.

After a moment, Peter’s listless gaze drifts up to the map that he has pinned to the wall above his head. It is the same map that first arrested Tony’s attention when the man arrived to recruit him, the same map marked with red ink in passionate scrawls and lines between the points where he first observed the surreptitious dealings of illegal weapons that sparked this entire investigation. It feels childish, now, the excitement that filled him each time he marked off another warehouse with an _X_ and stepped back and rubbed his lip to survey his handiwork. Holding back a fresh tide of tears, he whips out a hand to tear the map from the wall, but then--but then.

A pattern catches his eye.

Peter’s eyes widen. How is it possible that he failed to notice it before? If he reconsiders the two warehouses he raided in July which lie farther northeast in Queens, those dealings occurred around half past one in the morning and another near three, whereas the seven other raids he has marked on the map took place consistently before midnight. Peter chews his lip. Is it possible that he mistakenly included the two July warehouses on his map when they were wholly unrelated to his Toomes case?

The boy doesn’t waste another second of time. He scrambles for his notebook and pencil in the little flat box under his pillow, and he rifles through his newspaper clippings and torn scraps of paper where his notes are scribbled. He scans them--fingers trembling around his pencil--and as he glances back up at his map on the wall and scratches out the two July markings, his heart begins to thump, uneven and fast, behind the cage bars of his chest.

Because now with only seven warehouses marked instead of the original nine, he has an almost perfect circle around one specific shipyard.

The first thought that flies into Peter’s mind is _Tony must know this. He must know this development at once, and relay it to the sheriff, so that_ \--

But just as quickly as the notion leaps into his mind, he quells it. No. If he comes running back to Mr. Stark and Dr. Rhodes and the two men embark to investigate this lead, and he proves to be wrong, whatever shards of trust that the detective has remaining in Peter will be dissolved to dust.

Even worse are the images of Tony that flood his imagination--Tony wounded, Tony running to save him, a henchman of Toomes cocking his pistol and Rhodey screaming at the two of them to get out of the way, the bullet flying from the barrel and piercing the air and--

No. Peter’s resolve has now been cast in stone.

He must go to the shipyard by himself tonight, he and he alone. He shall share this with neither Tony nor Rhodey. If he is wrong and there is no evidence to be found, then he has avoided another humiliation; if he is right and he encounters the unsavory characters who work for this Toomes--well, then.

At least Tony and Rhodey will be safe.

After all, Peter was Spider-Man before Mr. Stark waltzed into his life. He _is_ Spider-Man, he tells himself, steeling his hands into fists at his side. Spider-Man can do this. He can prove his worth.

\--

It’s times like this that Peter wishes he washed his mask more often, he laments to himself, as he flits across the rooftop of a smithy’s place and the smoke puffing out of the chimney momentarily chokes him. He readjusts the lower portion of his flannel mask, the one that conceals his mouth and nose and leaves only his eyes visible against a strip of charcoal-rubbed skin in the moonlight. He leans into a lower crouch and surveys his surroundings from his vantage point.

The streets are fairly deserted at this time, he finds to his relief. He can probably drop down from the rooftop, scurry across the familiar network of alleyways without being seen, and then scale the unlit side of the scaffolds surrounding the shipyard until he has a better view of the happenings below. If his suspicions are correct--and he would say so, from the tug in his gut that he usually gets moments before one of his raids swings into full action--then he may chance upon Toomes’ henchmen there tonight, either packaging the weapons, or in the middle of a deal, and he can drop down on them unawares.

There is no more time for hesitation. He straightens from his crouch, squares his shoulders and takes a running leap at the next rooftop. That moment of freefall before his hands latch onto brick and mortar is exhilarating as ever--he feels masterful, in control, no longer a boy in scruffy braces and patched trousers but a nameless vigilante off to accomplish important work.

A whistle from below startles him so terribly that Peter nearly loses his grip on the brick wall of the building he’s clinging to. He whips his head around, seeking the source of the noise.

“Down here,” a reedy voice warbles.

Peter casts about more in the wrong direction until the voice repeats himself, and finally he directs his attention to the small patch of a girl’s face staring up at him from between his legs. He yelps.

“What are you--it’s late out, miss! Get back inside! Where are your parents?” In his panic, Peter has forgotten to pitch his voice downward.

The little girl furrows her brow at him. “You’re the rooftop caperer!”

“I do not--you know what.” Peter heaves a sigh. “Yes. Yes, I am. I’m the...caperer. Why are you not inside?”

“My father’s gone out in search of medicine for my momma,” she replies candidly. Her voice, though barely above a whisper, echoes against the cobblestones and walls of the enclave where she stands. “I was waiting up for him. I love you, Mr. Caperer! Me and my sister--Karen--we hear lots of things about you.”

“That’s--” Peter scratches his brow. “That’s nice. Quite lovely. Yes. Lovely. I’m sure you’re all wonderful too. Thank you.”

“Where are you going, Mr. Caperer?”

“Uh…” Peter wets his lips under the mask. “Spider-Man is fine.”

“Oh! Mr. Spider-Man! You sound very young.”

Peter squints down at her, mildly offended. “Without a doubt I’m older than you.”

She offers a small laugh. “So, Mr. Spider-Man, where are you headed?”

“To catch some criminals and no-gooders,” Peter answers solemnly, hoping the simple truth will get her off his back.

The girl grins toothily up at him. “Are you going to save us?”

“Uh...hopefully, yeah,” Peter says, bobbing his head from side to side. “But I need you to go back inside and wait for your poppa there, all right? Stay safe. Because the criminals and no-gooders might come this way and I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“Of course, Mr. Spider-Man.”

“Good. That’s good. What’s...what’s your name, miss?”

“Shannon,” says the girl, “but my poppa calls me Friday.”

“Lovely story,” Peter says in a hurry, gulping. “Go back inside, yeah? I will swing by sometime to check on your momma and poppa when I am done. It was...a pleasure meeting you, Friday.”

The black-haired girl lifts a tiny hand from underneath her shawl to wave up at him, and he waves back down at her for a second before launching himself to the roof and tumbling from chimneytop to chimneytop at near breakneck speed to make it to the shipyard before midnight.

\--

The odor of pungent oil mingled with mold and wet hemp wafts up to Peter as he crawls over the top of the fifteen-foot wooden scaffold. He blinks several times, panting to catch his breath, and in the space of those seconds he hones in on a cluster of voices from below.

“...Have to change the route immediately. They are onto us. Who knows whom they’ve alerted by this time.”

“I have more than enough connections to handle a local sheriff or two, Noah. Your lack of faith in my operation is irritating.”

“Last night was far too close a call.” This one is a new voice, deeper and gruffer.

“Too close a call, perhaps, due to your incompetence,” the second voice snaps. “Had you been on the alert, more readily armed, then the seven of your lot should not have been so easily taken by surprise by three...gangly meddlers.”

“The black one had plenty of pistols on him,” the third voice grumbles. “And the other...heavily trained in some kind of martial arts.”

“And the third?”

“A boy, perhaps the son of the second man. We tossed him overboard. He was a child of no consequence.”

In the dark, Peter’s mouth falls open in offense.

“And yet the seven of you against the two of them failed,” says the second voice. “When I was working with the other shipping company across the bay, I had far fewer incidents such as this and far fewer headaches. Which is to say: none.”

“We did not sign up to be tailed by some--some heavily armed mercenaries hired by the NYPD,” the first voice huffs.

Peter suppresses an unconscious chuckle to himself. He knows how many pistols Mr. Stark himself carries--precisely one--for the man much prefers to rely on his wits, nearby resources and sheer dumb luck in times of confrontation.

“Well, I certainly did not hire a band of quivering pansies who can’t even blow a bunch of nosy halfwits off their tracks. The money’s already with customs. We cannot change to another subcontractor now. I can tell an unsavory deal from the whiff of one, and I wager that you are trying to bleed me for more coin to cover a new barge and crew.”

The other two voices mumble defensively, and Peter has to lean forward to catch the tail end of their reply. As he does so, several things happen at once: first, he glimpses a kerosene lamp in the hand of one of the sailors from the night before, by whose glow he can see crates and crates stacked high as a man’s shoulder. One of the crates has been cracked open and nestled inside amid the hay is--unmistakably--the largest and most intimidating pair of rifles he has ever seen.

Second, the flimsy lath under his foot splinters and snaps, and he grapples at his hold on the scaffold but he is too late. He slips, tumbles, catches himself on the railing of the lower level of the scaffolding, but by now the three men below have jerked their heads up at the commotion.

And just as Peter is working up a quip to toss their way, the railing beneath his hands gives, too, and he hurtles in the air toward the floor of the shipyard below.

Only months of experience and the sometimes deadly accuracy of his instinct make him flip in time to land in a tumble and roll into a crouch on one knee, arm out to balance himself.

Peter blinks as the three men blink back. He is immensely grateful now, more than ever, that he obscured the area around his eyes with charcoal.

“I don’t believe in clichés,” he says casually, “but gentlemen, they do say the walls have ears.”

The tallest man of the three, the one who had been lecturing the two seamen, lifts an unimpressed brow. He folds his arms over his chest, leather duster creaking.

“You said this area was safe from surveillance,” he says, voice low. “Yet another proof of your idiocy. Finish him.”

“Right--well--” Peter backs up with his hands out, gaze sweeping from side to side to take stock of his resources at hand. “I’d been hoping for a bit more of a friendly chat, good sirs. You know. A verbal tousle.”

The first sailor wastes no time in flicking open a switchblade from his pocket. The second man sets down his lamp and draws a pistol from his belt.

“I suppose that’s a loud and resounding _no_ ,” Peter says cheerfully, and dives behind a steel drum an instant before the pistol goes off.

Sparks fly in the periphery of Peter’s vision as he huddles behind the drum, surveying the rest of the shipyard. There are piles of rope to his side, but as yet inaccessible without him leaping out from behind his cover straight into the line of fire. The half-built ship itself sits on a system of wooden tracks, at least the length of five full-grown men across, and each track is just about deep enough for him to duck into and run along for better coverage.

Peter makes a face of indecision. After a split second, he pulls off the glove of his right hand and flings it to his right, just as he himself rolls out from behind the drum and slides across the dank floor toward the tracks where the ship rests. Sure enough, the sailor with a gun fires madly in the direction of the rustle from where the glove fell, while the other seaman grunts at him, “Over there!” and the two stumble and knock into one another in their haste to scramble in opposite directions.

Peter kneels in the trench, partially concealed by the shadow of the ship looming over him. He grabs the end of the nearest pile of rope as silently as he can and yanks it toward him. The length of hemp slithers toward him, and he wraps it around his right forearm as he squints into the gloom to discern his pursuers’ whereabouts.

The flash of the moonlight against the tip of the one sailor’s switchblade tips him off that they are nearer than he first suspected. He whistles, hollering, “Over here, boys!” and springs one-handed to the side of the ship, where his left hand slips into a solid handhold. The steel clang of the mens’ heeltips clatters toward him. Peter jerks on the rope with all his might, and the other end tightens around the winch, tripping both men in a pile of shouts and _oofs_. 

The boy doesn’t pause to wait for them to regain their bearings. He leaps down onto the floor on deer-light feet and dashes around them, wrapping the rope about their torsos to pin their arms to their sides. The one holding the pistol rouses himself enough to fire several rounds of bullets, but Peter dances out of the way, yelping, “Ouch! What _rudeness_!”

The boy risks flitting near them to grab them by their napes and, in one smooth gesture, bash their foreheads together. The sailors slump, curses half-formed on their lips, into a heavy stupor.

Peter has little time to celebrate his victory. From across the shipyard comes the first man’s voice, bellowing, “You imbeciles! Have you lost track of him? Come out and report immediately.”

Heavy boots slap against the floor. Peter sucks in a breath and holds it, ribs straining from the effort of suppressing his breathless noises. He slinks back into the shadows of the ship. His eyes dart about, trying to calculate by the shadow of the man cast by the moonlight how close he is on the other side of the boat.

“What idiots,” the man mutters. The sibilance of his whisper echoes in the shipyard. “Here I am again, having to do everything myself.”

Peter inches back on tiptoe, thankful for the slippers in his Spider-Man ensemble that soften his footfalls. The roughness of the wood at his back rasps against the flannel of his suit. He winces and steps away, only to press his toes against a plank that splinters infinitesimally beneath his weight.

“Hello, my friend,” says the man, right by Peter’s ear, and the boy stiffens and whips his head to the side. He is greeted by the cock of a gun and a barrel of steel between his eyes, and the toothy leer of the man in a leather duster less than two feet from him.

“I suppose you’re not so clever after all,” the man chuckles.

“Uh--” Peter swallows. He is an idiot, the first in his class--he knows this--and yet nothing, not even the bullets poised to fly into his skull, can stop him from blurting out: “That would be your men, considering they’re trussed up now like a couple of Christmas turkeys and knocked out till Sunday.” And he tacks on: “Sir.”

Something in the man’s face morphs subtly at the sound of Peter’s voice. There’s a beat of silence. “You’re but a boy, aren’t you.”

“I’m--I’m not. I’m a man!” Peter protests.

The man sounds bored now. He gestures impatiently with the end of his pistol. “You have come to meddle with the affairs of men, boy. You do not understand what you are seeing. Go now, while I still take pity on you and you have a chance. But if you breathe a word of this to anyone--and I mean _anyone_ \--I will surely hunt you and your family down, and everyone you have ever loved, and this will be the last time they see the light of day.”

The boy gulps. “See--that’s...that’s precisely why only one of us can come out of this. Alive.”

The man cocks a brow. “And you presume it to be you, do you? You, who stands there quaking at the end of my gun against your brow?” He huffs out a laugh. “Have you even any idea who I _am_?”

Peter draws himself to his full height. Stupid he is when it counts, yes, he may very well own that, but no one can ever say that Peter Parker was anything less than brave. If not a buffoon.

“I know they call you Toomes,” he says on a hunch.

At that, the man’s gaze clouds over. A haze of rage descends upon him. “How foolish of you, little birdy. You’ve lost your chance now. Be prepared to bid your goodbyes to the world.”

\--

A rap at the lintel of the study--more akin to a fist against wood--rouses Tony and Rhodey from their smoked-out doze in their armchairs by the fireplace.

Rhodey is the first to rise to the surface of consciousness. “Miss Potts!” he exclaims, straightening. “What is it? What time is it?”

“Just the man we needed,” Pepper says briskly. She gestures with her fingers at the doorway, and a wee bundle of cotton pinafore and woolen shawl comes traipsing in.

“Friday!” says Rhodey, perplexed. At the sound of his tone, Tony blinks awake at his side.

“What,” says Tony. His voice is gravelly. “Who. What is happening.”

The little girl gives a clumsy curtsy, earning a sleepy smile from all three adults around her, and states her case. “My poppa sent me to fetch you right away, Dr. Rhodes, he said to come straightaway, please and thank you, on account of my momma who’s taken her medication for her fever but it doesn’t seem to be abiding.”

“Abating?” Tony corrects her absently. “Yes, yes, Rhodey, go fetch your bag, run along and help the dear girl, we owe her family that much.”

Rhodey lifts a single brow at his roommate in a clear statement of disapproval of the bossiness of his tone, but it is belied by the reluctant smile on his face. He directs his attention to Friday. “Yes, of course, I will be right there, Friday. Be a good girl and wait a moment while I fetch my things, and then we shall be off in no time. Your mother will be right as rain as long as I am around and can help it, I promise you.”

The girl bites her lip and nods. As Pepper disappears on Rhodey’s heels in search of a cup of water and a biscuit, Friday laces her fingers together before her and bounces up and down on the balls of her feet.

Tony, who has the left side of his face slumped into the palm of his hand, cracks open his right eye to study Friday. “Hm,” he mutters. “I know all too well by now the look of a young busybody bursting to spill some news to me. C’mon, now. Out with it.” He tacks on a smile hastily, though not unkindly.

“I saw the rooftop caperer tonight,” Friday whispers conspiratorially.

Tony hums, half intrigued and half disbelievingly. “Ah, did you?”

She nods vigorously. “He spoke to me from a chimney. He said to call him Mr. Spider-Man.”

That has Tony’s full attention now. He sits up and leans forward with his elbows on his knees, gaze trained on the dark-haired and sooty-cheeked child before him. “He did, did he? What else did he say?”

“He said he’d...come by and visit my momma and poppa. To see if she was well after tonight.”

That sounds precisely like Peter to Tony. His mind, however, is whirring with other possibilities, more serious implications of the fact that Peter is up and about at midnight less than twenty-four hours after he nearly drowned.

“That was kind of him. Did you--happen to ask where he was going, Miss Friday?”

“He just said he was going to catch some ‘criminals and no-gooders’,” Friday reports, scratching her chin. “He was headed toward the docks. The--the yard--the ship…?”

“Shipyard?” Tony supplies. The girl nods.

The man wastes no more time. He hauls himself to his feet, pausing only to pat the girl on the shoulder in thanks for her information. He steers her toward Pepper as the woman approaches them again with a package of sweets and bread wrapped in cheesecloth for Friday to take home.

“Oh, so you’ve finally decided to embrace your role as Jimmy’s nurse?” Pepper teases Tony.

Tony returns her banter with only a distracted semblance of a smile. “I believe our...other young friend has gotten himself into some trouble.”

Pepper’s face clouds. “Already?”

“I know, he seems rather fond of mishaps and suffering, if I do say so myself,” says Tony. “And this, coming from Anthony Stark.”

Pepper rolls him a look as dry as the Sahara. “I would have said the same thing, but you stole the very words from my mouth. You’re learning.”

“Yes, darling,” Tony says flippantly, hardly realizing the term of endearment has slipped from his lips. “Anything to please you, fair Valhallan goddess of my dreams. Now. Where’s my top hat? Off I go. Do keep an eye on Friday, will you? She’s my favorite neighborhood watchdog. Thank you, and remind me that I owe you dinner for this next week. A proper one!” He shrugs on his overcoat and pockets his pistol, and with a whirl he is gone.

“The shipyard!” Pepper utters aloud, to no one in particular, as she thinks back on what she heard Tony say last before she reappeared. “But that’s--the idiot bastard hasn’t even got a horse!”

\--

“Right,” Tony huffs to himself, rather impressed at his own newfound heights of idiocy, after he has been sprinting down the street for three minutes. “I haven’t got a horse.”

He makes a hard right to swing by a parallel street where he hears the whinny of horses and the clatter of hooves and wheels against cobblestones. Sure enough, there is a hansom speeding along, pulled by a single Spanish Jennet.

“Stop, ho!” Tony hollers. “I need a ride to the shipyard downtown, straightaway!”

The cab driver barely pauses to pay him any mind. Tony finds himself jogging to keep up, waving his arms.

“Stop, I say!” Tony tries again.

“I’m taking the gentleman in the opposite direction, sir,” the driver answers at last, at great length and with a measure of annoyance. “You’ll have to flag down someone else.”

“I’ll pay handsomely.”

“Another time, sir.”

“This is--this is a matter of state business!” Tony bluffs, failing at his story spectacularly. “C’mon, my good man, stop a moment.”

The driver has no choice but to pull to a halt when Tony springs in front of his path, looking nothing less than a madman. An old gentleman’s voice warbles from inside the hansom, inquiring about the sudden stop. The driver’s hand flies to the gun at his side, but Tony knocks it expertly from his hand and brandishes his own.

“Sorry, sorry, this is not a hijacking,” Tony says, quite self-contradictorily. “I assure you, my name is Anthony Stark and I am--an associate of the sheriff. You are free to inquire at the station as to the legitimacy of my business. But this is urgent, and I am in need of a steed, and I cannot emphasize enough that this is, quite possibly, a matter of life and death.”

“But--”

“Thank you for your kindness, sir, truly, it’s inspiring,” Tony says, cutting away the harnessing from the horse.

“I will _not_ \--”

“Yes, I apologize likewise for the circumstances of our meeting being less than ideal. Here’s something for your pains.” Tony swings himself bareback onto the steed and tosses a purse into the lap of the openmouthed driver. He points backward even as he kicks the horse to giddy up, and he hollers back over his shoulder, “I promise there is twice that amount in recompense awaiting you when I return! Thank you!”

The driver and passenger’s joint selection of expletives is lost over the howl of the wind as Tony digs his heels into the sides of the stallion and it jets forward, thundering down the street toward the docks. As Tony hunches over, clinging for dear life and considering who between him and Peter Parker may be suffering a worse death at the end of the night when all this is over, he rehearses variations of the lecture he will have prepared for the boy the moment he slaps eyes on him again.

\--

Swift as a hummingbird, Peter knocks the barrel of Toomes’ gun away from his face not moments before the pistol goes off and the bullet ricochets off the edge of the iron chain holding the ship in place.

Peter and Toomes share a glance fraught with desperation and fury. Toomes raises his gun and fires again, and Peter cartwheels out of the way, stumbling over the edge of the tracks and only barely righting himself on his feet again. Toomes shoots again and again, advancing upon him, driving him into a corner where the boy will be trapped between the winches and the sides of the boat.

The boy leaps and latches onto the side of the ship. He scrabbles for purchase--nearly slides half a foot down, and the next bullet lodges in the wood a centimeter from his temple. Heart beating in his throat now, he hauls his weight upward and scrambles up the side with the force of an adrenaline he never knew he possessed. The next thing he knows, he is on his side on the unfinished poop deck, and Toomes is firing round after round up through the railing toward his chest.

Mind racing, Peter tries a new tactic. “Just give up, Toomes!” he yells down. He loathes the tremor in his voice. “The police already know you’re here, and they will be arriving at any moment now.”

“Well, then, all the more reason we had better end this, once and for all,” Toomes bellows, and he lets loose another rain of bullets.

Peter springs back and presses himself under cover. “Well, that backfired,” he mutters. “Christ, how many guns _does_ he have?”

His eye lands on a mass of netting not too far from where he is huddled. He makes a quick mental calculation, listening for the sound and distance of Toomes’ gun firing. If he swings down at just the right height and speed, he figures, he can engulf the man in the netting, land in a run on the ground and wrap Toomes in the ropes completely until he is immobilized.

Peter does not stop to think. He launches himself from his hiding spot, arching for the netting, and for a moment he can see it right before him, inches away from his fingertips. Then there’s the explosion of a firearm--different, sharper, more powerful--and the spray of red droplets fills his line of vision. He feels suspended, he feels as though he’s flying, weightless and detached from his emotions, and then in a second it all comes crashing down on him: the pain, the sound of the scream wrenched from his throat, the air speeding past him as he freefalls to the ground.

He doesn’t register the impact of the fall. Not when there is a stab of white-hot pain in his shoulder gushing with wetness, pouring, flooding, never ending.

More gunshots sound in the distance. They feel muffled, inconsequential now. Through watery eyes and gritted teeth, Peter can just make out the vermilion sparks of bullets flying off the iron chains holding the ship in place. More bullets find their way in the oak beams above him, and then there’s shadows, something looming and monstrous creaking, swaying side to side, and a fall, the rush and terror of a great big _everything_ collapsing on top of him--

His memory fails him. Everything is a jumble. He scrambles half to his feet at some point, only to be met with an explosion of pain at his lower back, followed by more cracking of wood and the sickening sound of the ship sliding back and the steel chains snapping in the very air above him.

Weight hits him and pins him to the floor like nothing that has ever fallen on him before. One moment Peter has his mouth open in a wordless cry, and then the next his consciousness is plunged into fear and blackness.

\--

On waking, Peter is petrified.

After a quick catalog of his body, he cannot think of any part of him that is not hurting. In the wake of his adrenaline rush, his senses are on alert. He is hyper-aware of the copper stench of his own blood, the strain of the bones in his arm where they meet at an ungodly angle.

The weight on his back. The splintered surface below him tearing through the flannel of his suit into the skin of his chest.

The icy steel of the chain on the back of his leg. Water lapping outside the edges of his consciousness.

Toomes. Tony. May.

He wrenches for the surface, the surface of this--this grave of detritus he’s been buried in. The movement tugs at his shoulder and pulls a guttural sound from deep within him.

“Please,” he cries. “Please!” Hoarse. Desperate.

“Please,” he tries again. “Somebody out there! Help me! Help! _Please_...” The least few sounds of his words dissolve into sobs, ragged and ugly, rattling in his chest. Every breath leaves him with a whistle and feels like his last.

He doesn’t know where to focus. The fiery stab of the bullet in his shoulder is ever-present, the weight of broken wood and iron on top of him all-consuming. The darkness triggers the buried memories of night spent in crippling uncertainty, lost in his nightmares and crying out for his mother, his father, as he wandered in a sea of pitch black without another human voice to answer him.

“Help me,” he whispers again, broken. “Help me, I’m here, I’m here… _help me_...God…”

The echo of water dripping teases his imagination, mocks his desperation. He lies there quaking, knowing neither up nor down, and he tells himself with a shaky breath that he must come to terms with the fact that no one is coming to his rescue.

May’s countenance floats into his consciousness, pallid and wide-eyed and determined. Just like the night before when he tempted death so brashly as he plunged into the water, Peter’s thoughts fix on the remembrance of his aunt, the only constant in his memory.

 _“I know how your mind works, child,”_ her voice seems to glide around him.

Peter sniffles.

_“I know, Peter. You see the best in others and the worst in yourself. But There is not a world I can imagine where you, with your kindness and bravery, could disappoint anyone so.”_

The boy bursts into a fresh wave of tears that drenches his face. For where have his kindness and bravery led him?

Still the voice of his aunt is firm in his mind. _”I know you, Peter, for your kindness and your bravery.”_

 _Kindness and bravery. Kindness and bravery_.

“I can do this,” Peter mutters around a shuddering breath. “I can--I can do this. For you, May. For me. To get back and to--to prove myself and stay alive for you and--for _you_.”

He braces himself with his palms against the floor, splinters burrowing into his skin, and with a cry like a lion breathing back to life he lifts with all his might.

\--

The shipyard is in absolute ruins when Tony pulls up to it in a clatter on his horse. He jerks the reins to steer his steed to a halt before they misstep onto the fractured, drifting remains of the floor and scaffolding, where the ship appears to have torn free of its restraints and crushed everything in its path backwards into the river.

“Peter,” Tony breathes. “No, no, _Peter_ \--”

Just before his panic can spiral further into abject madness, a cacophony of shouts and blows arrests his attention. The sounds are ringing out from not too far away, down the docks where there are other dinghies anchored in the midnight fog. Tony kicks the horse forward in that direction and they take off in a canter.

“Peter!” Tony hollers, throwing stealth to the sea. “Peter? Can you hear me?”

The sight that greets him is answer enough. He slides off the horse in a graceless tumble and hobbles down the dock to the small sailboat that would have taken off down the waterway, if not for the rope caught between its mast and one of the posts onshore. The silhouette of an imposing man in the moonlight looms over that of a figure Tony would recognize anywhere--small, lithe, limping, and entirely brave but _stupid_.

“Peter!” Tony screams.

“Just a minute!” the boy has the cheek to yell back, as he headbutts the taller man square in the chin and wraps a swath of--of _netting_ around his adversary’s neck and arms with one hand.

The man groans, sways--then collapses with a clatter and thud at the bottom of the sailboat.

Tony flails from where he stands on the very edge of the dock. “What on _earth_ do you think you’re--Christ on a chariot, is that _blood_?”

The boy stumbles to the railing of the boot and reaches out his left hand to his mentor. He’s visibly trembling, a body-length flinch of adrenaline and fatigue in one.

“Just a scratch,” Peter pants out.

“Peter _Benjamin_ Parker--” Tony cuts himself off with the effort of hauling his intern over the side of the boat. The weight of the boy simply crumpling to the ground drags Tony down with him. Tony lands on his knees with a gasp, and his gaze falls on the fragment of bone sticking out of the boy’s suit, and the splash of crimson darkening in a morbid patch across his torso--

“Christ Almighty,” Tony chokes out again. “Christ. Peter. My boy. Wake up. Wake _up_. What happened? Stay with me, boy!”

Peter mumbles something behind half-lidded eyes, compelling the man to bend over to hear him. “What?”

“I sai’,” says Peter, “Tha’s th’ las’ time I’m goin’ near...a boat...ever again.”

That, of all things, makes Tony laugh and weep and quake all over, all at once, and he crushes the child in his arms against his chest, spouting apologies only when the boy moans in pain at his broken limb.

“Damn straight you aren’t,” Tony whispers fiercely. “You are never leaving my sight again, Mr. Parker.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: Quick, I need your help. What should fall on top of Peter? A beam?  
> notapartytrick: iron chains? a small boat??  
> notapartytrick: beams are a good call. as long as a combination of wood and iron chains falls on top of him and slowly starts to crush him that'll be good  
> Me: love how casually you said that. Love that for us  
> notapartytrick: Tis the whumpers' life
> 
> Seriously, I owe so much to my mate @notapartytrick for the plotting, Victorian fashion advice, research and general whumper-crazy screaming of support. Thank you, Doisy!!
> 
> Coming up next: Peter recovers; Rhodey and Pepper convince Tony to own up to his emotional constipation and admit his paternal feelings for the boy; and Tony more than makes up for his previous failings by having a heart-to-heart with Peter. And mayhaps, a certain Tony and Pepper get together.
> 
> Please share your reactions and feedback!! There's nothing that makes me happier than hearing from you <3 -kaleb
> 
> muh tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> muh insta: kc.barrie


	4. The Game Is Afoot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He cannot play a farmhand. Absolutely not. Have you seen his soft baby hands?” May says. She bats her hair impatiently from her eyes and straightens her apron.
> 
> “I do not have soft baby hands,” Peter protests. “I use these hands, day in and day out--”
> 
> “To make wild gesticulations and knock over my favorite candlesticks, yes, this is common knowledge to us,” Tony finishes for him. “No. You are right, May. A bell boy, perhaps?”
> 
> “No, that won’t do,” says Rhodey. “The regulars would recognize him for an outsider in an instant.”
> 
> “Newspaper boy.”
> 
> “Telegram boy,” Pepper suggests.
> 
> Tony snaps his fingers. “Yes. Yes! A telegram boy! You are a genius, Miss Potts.”
> 
> “On the contrary. I agreed to marry you.”  
> \--  
> In the thrilling and emotional conclusion to it all, Peter wakes up with an arc reactor taped to his chest, May finds herself dragged into the chaotic Stark-Rhodes-Potts household, and Tony and Pepper finally own up to some feelings for each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The only warning here is there's slight whump. Like. The slightest of slight. Idek how to write about broken bones or bullet wounds, man. Let's just roll with it.

“Dear Mrs. Parker. _Dear_ , patient, ever saintly Mrs. Parker--I can explain.”

“That,” May hisses, pointing her finger in the detective’s direction, “is precisely what every man says before he opens his mouth and all the comes out is--”

“--Ah! Aha! Right, well, censoring that bit out for the sake of infant ears present,” Tony rushes over her, with a half-apologetic, half-loaded glance toward the bed mere feet away where Peter’s pallid figure is tucked in, drawing in low, whistling breaths, his lips colorless and hair damp against his brow.

Wordlessly, May presses her lips together, then reaches forward to seize Tony by the coat sleeve and haul him into the hallway.

“An excellent solution,” Tony says with a grimace. “Please, carry on.”

“Horse piss,” says May with a fold of her arms. “That is what I was about to say. And what exactly, pray you tell, gave you the right to snatch my son, have him scurry along into a den of thieves and then--and then--begin to _operate_ on him before even once thinking to fetch me and inform me of this?”

(Evidently, no one dares--or cares--to correct her that Peter is her nephew.)

“Ah,” says Tony. “Operating. Thieves. Right. That.”

Rhodey passes by the two of them in the hallway, doctor’s bag in one hand and tray of sweets in the other, and remarks: “In his defense, we were under the impression that the boy was at home recuperating from the river incident.”

May’s face mottles with color and her voice flies a few octaves up to the heavens. “The--the _river incident_?”

Tony drops his face into his hands and rubs the bridge of his nose. He claps a palm on Rhodey’s shoulder. “Truly, Jim, your loyalty is legendary. Your ability to think under pressure--unparalleled.”

To his credit, Rhodey makes a face of contrition. “We owe you every apology, Mrs. Parker. From the bottom of our hearts."

"If ever we do come to agreement on whether I have one," Tony mutters at him from the side of his mouth, covered by a gentlemanly cough. At Rhodey's look rolled his way which speaks thousands more volumes than even May Parker's _horse piss_ , Tony has the decorum to look appropriately abashed.

The muscle jumps in May's jaw as she uncrosses and recrosses her arms over her chest and regards the two men before her with a fleet of emotions warring over her visage. Wisps of dark hair have been tugged loose from her braid long ago, no doubt from her short-breathed sprint from the Parker apartment to the Stark residence at Tony's note delivered by Friday. The woman straightens to her quite average yet somehow menacing height, takes a moment now to bat the strands of hair from the sides of her face, and juts her chin out at Tony and Rhodey with the frightening and irrelevant beauty of an avenging angel.

May sniffs. She finally drops her hands and wrings them in the folds of her robe, an unnecessarily embroidered piece courtesy of Pepper. "I--" she starts out, and hesitates. "Gentlemen...I owe you both his life tonight. And as loath as I am to admit that fact, I will forever be beholden to you--you, doctor, for your skills, your patience, your surgical knowledge and...well. You as well, Mr. Stark, for your...unconventional solution given the pressure and the circumstances." Her voice fails her on the last several syllables, but still she forges on, quieting her restless fingers by the sheer steel of her will. "While I am most disposed to have somebody to blame for--for Peter's condition--lying there as he is, at death's door--I know by my good conscience that neither of you would have knowingly, or in your right minds, sent Peter out on a death mission. That was…" A bitter, yet somehow proud, little smile flits across her face. "That one is all on my baby."

Tony scrubs the side of his face, sighing. "Perhaps it was not my hand that seized him by the shoulders and propelled him into that shipyard, but it may as well have been I. For all my--Mrs. Parker, I have been an idiot. Unforgivably so."

May eyes him in momentary distrust. "How so?"

The man now traces the lines in his brow with a hand, for want of something with which to fidget as the words pour out of him in a flood of guilt and self-loathing. "Mrs. Parker, a man may think himself a genius when he solves a murder and discerns the motive of the perpetrator after the fact, but truly he is given to hubris when he thinks he can predict what any person may be motivated to do when he feels rejected."

Rhodey coughs lightly at his side. He mumbles, "Finally, Tony, some noteworthy detecting."

"I don't--" May blinks. "I don't understand."

"The river incident," Tony explains, eyes acquiring the sheen of a tortured man, "it awoke me to Peter's true vulnerability as an associate in our case with the weapons manufacturer. I was shocked--devastated. At dis-ease with myself that I could have been so cavalier as to risk his safety by placing him among bona fide hoodlums. I made up my mind; I sent him home to recover, both physically and mentally, until this case was over. I had every intention of standing by our financial contract, ma'am, don't you doubt that, and indeed I planned to have him back on desk duty when it was all over. But I--" Tony winces. "--Regrettably, I am...as you say...what was it? Ah, yes. Horse piss at communication."

The cloud in May's eyes clears in realization. She runs a hand through her hair, only to stop when it tangles in her braid. "Peter came home thinking he had lost the internship."

Rhodey sniffs loudly and makes a complicated gesture, curling his fist over his mouth to conceal the quirk there.

"Really, James?" Tony hisses under his breath. "I would appreciate the _I told you_ so after a brandy." He addresses himself again to May. "Mrs. Parker...I am so sorry."

"He felt he had to prove himself to you. He thought you'd fired him," May goes on, thinking aloud to herself, as if neither man had spoken. "I--I should have known. Ever since Ben--he was young, that was so recent and he is yet still young--and, by the angel, if that boy hasn't carried on his shoulders the weight of having to prove himself the new man in the household…"

Tony stares at her, slack-jawed, for several seconds. When his mouth snaps shut, nearly everyone flinches, as if unconsciously having heard the last piece of the puzzle fall into place.

"Mrs. Parker. I beg your patience, but you'll forgive the intrusion for a moment, I certainly hope, as my inquiries and little questions are never of an idle nature… Peter tells me your late husband was a policeman?"

She nods.

"And was it...he...perhaps, who might have taught Peter in--how shall we put it--"

"Gymnastic tricks and martial arts?" she finishes for him.

Tony presses his mouth in a line as if to bodily refrain from questioning her assessment of the martial in Peter's...arts. "Yes."

"Yes, it was Ben. What has this got to do with what is at hand?"

"I promise you, there is a point." Tony ducks into the study behind May, where People laid out Peter's shredded suit of navy and maroon flannel and his hood, mask and goggles. Wordlessly, the man spins around again and places the pile of river-stenched fabric in May's outstretched hands.

She stares. And swallows. "I... don't understand."

Tony and Rhodey share a look over her head. Rhodey steps forward, his face crumpling into knowing sympathy. He pauses just shy of touching her shoulder, and he and Tony watch as she traces a quaking finger over the smudged spider symbol on the chest of the tattered suit, painted there in black.

"I think you do," Rhodey says to her, ever so gently.

"I do, I do," she mutters. "And--I, I, I don't."

"Your boy said something to me the day we walked into your home," Tony says. "He uttered it to me, in the privacy of the other room, and I was given to the impression that it was something he believed so staunchly in, but perhaps may not have spoken aloud to anyone prior to me. 'When evil happens and you do nothing, then the evil happened because of you.'"

Something akin to a sob tears from somewhere deep in May's chest. She pauses a moment for breath--one that they all seem to hold, collectively--and she glances at the two men on either side of her in the hallway. In that moment a flash of understanding, fierce and challenging, colors her gaze. Tony stiffens infinitesimally, almost as if May herself had just spoken and declared the phrase a saying passed on to her by the late Ben Parker. But when she opens her mouth--waits, lets the moment drop between them--Tony gives her the smallest of nods: acknowledgement, apology, silence, respect, all wrapped up into one.

They will not speak of Ben Parker or his legacy in her presence again. Now that she knows the boy--the man--behind the suit, or better yet the suit behind the man, there is no need to touch on the subject further. She crumples the ball of flannel to her chest with a distant look toward the doorway behind which her nephew now lies, tucked under linen sheets and raw bandages and a new-fangled heart-ticking contraption on his chest.

"I overstep when I say this, and--rest assured, I am perfectly aware of the numerous times I've already done so--but I hope you won't have to be too hard on the boy," Tony finds himself saying, almost beyond his own volition.

May swabs at her face with the heel of her palm, too quickly almost for any of them to acknowledge. "I never am," she says softly. "Only when need be, and merely out of the fear that resides in my heart."

"Understandable," says Rhodey. "And I'm afraid we are exacerbating whatever it is your heart feels now, by standing out here by candlelight at half past five in the morning. Forgive our manners, Mrs. Parker--"

"May," she interrupts softly. "I--you both may call me May."

Rhodey's face curves up in a smile. "May. We entreat you to stay the night. It would all do us immense good to get some shut-eye. Your nephew is sleeping, and I suspect he won't be up and speaking for several hours yet."

For the first time that night, May throws an effort into a tired yet genuine smile at them both. "Dr. Rhodes, I commend your good judgment."

"On the contrary," Rhodey says modestly, tapping her by the elbow and steering her toward another guest bedroom as Tony trails behind, "I am a boor. My fine company here with whom I spend far too much time, really, makes an excellent foil to contrast my mediocre judgment."

"That is the best backhanded compliment you've delivered me yet, if ever there was one," Tony observes, around the stem of his clay pipe that has--as before--materialized in his mouth.

May secretly rolls her eyes at their antics. "I mean it sincerely, doctor. Many are the health professionals I have worked with, and few are as considerate as you."

"An unfortunate flavor of the trauma engendered by the profession," says Rhodey. "But I'm flattered. Would you perhaps like to come by sometime when...er...your nephew's health is not so compromised, and tour the clinic round back?"

"I'll do you one better," says Tony, before May can reply. "Why don't you hire the good woman, Rhodey?"

"Oh, I--"

"Almost every time you open your mouth, you give me the urge to punch you in your obnoxious face, but for once you are right, like a twice-broken clock," Rhodey says lightly.

Tony dips his head in a mocking semblance of a bow. "And his faith in me has been restored."

"Surely I couldn't accept that," May protests.

"I insist," says Rhodey.

"He insists," says Tony, pointing his pipe at Rhodey.

Rhodey smothers a laugh. May's own face twitches and gives way to a sigh. "I will give it thought."

"Please do," Rhodey returns affably.

"And join us for breakfast," Tony adds. "Please, and thank you. It would be, oh, so easy on our conscience to work out our atonement to you through biscuits and coffee."

"Your atonement," Rhodey reminds him offhand. "I protested loudly and thoroughly at every step of the process."

\--

There are three sensations that intensely and irrevocably bear down on Peter the moment he wakes: first, that he is in a bed far too soft to be his own, much less that of the public hospital, and therefore he must have either been kidnapped by a prince or now owe an entire life's worth of debt to one; second, that his back burns and he can feel neither his arm nor his shoulder; and third, that there is a weight like a brick on his chest, and coldness, and a ticking and whirring there whose source he is beginning to fear having to open his eyes and look at.

"Slowly now," comes the familiar, soothing tone of May's voice.

"Don't sit up. Keep your eyes closed for a moment." Another voice. "Do you know where you are?"

"Uh--" Peter winces, then lifts his left arm to rub at the top of his head. Everything is leaden. "...Not a dungeon?"

The second voice devolves into an elegant snort.

Peter's eyes fly open, only for him to be assaulted by a vengeful stream of sunlight from the nearest window at his bedside. "Wait--May-- _are_ we in a dungeon? What--where--"

Another woman begins to speak, and as Peter's vision clears little by little, he can just discern the silhouette of Pepper's statuesque figure ringed by her red hair and the cast of light behind her. "Yes, Peter, you are in a dungeon. A very comfortable one. I'm sorry you have been imprisoned with these fools for so long." She points to the side, where Tony waves like an idiot and Rhodey, seated beside him, purses his lips.

"I'll have you know there is a method to my madness," Tony mutters.

Rhodey scoffs. "Did you not mean a madness to your methods?"

"Baby," May interrupts them, her hand flying to Peter's forehead to check his temperature. From a nearby nightstand she fills a tin cup with water for him. "Petey, honey, how are you feeling?"

The boy considers that for a moment. "Hnghh," is what he comes up with a beat later.

Tony sniffs and taps his own knees. "That sounds about right, considering your heart is now beating to the time of what I like to call a reactor clock taped to your chest."

Peter furrows his brow, still woozy and uncomprehending. He follows Tony's line of vision, gapes at the glowing copper and blue disc-like contraption strapped to his chest, inhales once, and then promptly passes out.

"Well, that wasn't dramatic at all," Rhodey drawls. "Anthony Stark, you are a theater boy through and through."

\--

The second time Peter wakes up, he instantly remembers the weird disc planted on his chest, and his brain decides it would once again like to take a vacation from reality.

\--

The third time Peter wakes, it is to Tony munching on a chicken leg from a tray balanced precariously on his knees. It does not help the boy's visual that his mentor is seated cross-legged in some painful-looking contortion of his knees and ankles.

"Meditational pose of the East Indies," Tony says conversationally, gesturing roundly with his drumstick. "It works marvels for the inner chakras and digestion. Oh, and my unfortunately aligned back. Do you think you're quite ready now to join us permanently in the land of the living?"

"Debatable," the boy mutters, knuckling his eye with his left hand. "But I'm famished."

The tray rattles as Tony gets to his feet in a clatter and approaches, even before Peter has finished speaking. The man taps the kid on his good shoulder with the back of his hand to get him to sit up higher, while Tony reaches behind him with a sniff and quickly fluffs the pillows.

Tony thrusts a cup of water first under Peter's nose. The boy snatches it, hand trembling, and downs the contents in a handful of gulps. “Thank you,” he remembers to say, at the last moment, as he drags the back of his hand across his mouth. He squints up at Tony, his voice already sounding more normal again. "I hope that wasn't poisoned."

"Oh, it most certainly was," Tony deadpans. "I derive immense joy from spending sleepless hours at a child's bedside after my doctor friend and I operated on his injuries, just so I can personally orchestrate said child's murder through wine and hemlock."

"I'm sure there is a reference there you know is beyond me," says Peter with another narrow-eyed glance his way. "Oh--mm. This soup. It's delicious."

"I would expect no less, considering that I had no hand in its creation. How goes the old ticker? Feeling anything unusual?"

Peter pauses in spooning his chicken soup in favor of rolling Tony a droll look. "Aside from the wires taped to my chest and the threat of this, this contraption imploding next to my ribs," he says, "all's right as rain."

Tony claps, once. "Marvelous. You'll get used to it."

Peter hesitates. "Um, sir--" His face twists. "How and why did I come to need this? And...er...what kind of…"

"What kind of technology is it? Who created it? How have you not heard of it before?" Tony finishes for him. "That would be because I invented it. Using my knowledge of the neuro-electrical impulses of the heart and the rudimentary mechanics of the timing in clocks, I put it together for you."

"Huh." Peter chews his lip. He takes another sip of his broth. "And...when did you become an expert on the neuro-electrical impulses of the heart and rudimentary mechanics of clocks, Mr. Stark?"

Tony leans forward in his chair and cups his chin. "Last night."

The boy audibly chokes on his own soup.

"There, there," Tony encourages him, thumping the kid gingerly on the shoulder. "See, when the scaffolding collapsed on top of you and the particularly large splinters pierced you from behind, your back was littered by superficial wounds, but deep enough to herald a possible infection. Hence, your lovely little fever-induced nap. Then you sustained a fractured ulna, a dislocated patella, bruised lungs--nearly punctured, tsk, tsk--cracked ribs--and...ah! That wonderful old bullet hole in your shoulder. You certainly saw to it that we had our work cut out for us, Rhodey and I."

Peter scrunches up his nose. He feels like he should be saying sorry, but then again he knows what kind of rabbit hole of teasing and incessant inside jokes that will inevitably rouse out of Tony, so he wisely abstains. He sets his spoon back down inside his bowl instead. "So my heart, what, exactly? Stopped beating on its own?"

Tony hums evasively. "I wouldn't say it ceased to beat on its own, so much as the shock of the other night's events led you...to...require...occasional, if frequent, auxiliary resuscitation from the reactor clock."

Peter finishes up the rest of his soup with a thoughtful slurp. He flexes the fingers in his left hand. His fingertips tingle distantly. "Well, that's mildly concerning," he says, light tone completely belying the turmoil beginning to spin beneath his surface.

His mentor takes several deep breaths from somewhere above him. The last one he draws sounds unsteady--perhaps a bit sharp--but the sound doesn’t prompt the boy to look up at him, even though both of them know that Tony is waiting for him to meet his eyes so they can cut to the chase and address whatever it is they have merely been skirting around till now. 

When seconds pass and still Peter refuses to look up at him, Tony slips off his chair and slides onto one knee on the floor at Peter's bedside.

"Peter," he says. "Hey."

There is a tenderness there, suddenly, something foreign and new, and entirely disconcerting to both of them. Enough so that the kid's head finally jerks up and swivels to look up at him.

"I am…" Tony searches for the right word. "...Not the best at expressing my sentiments, particularly when they have more to do with matters of the heart and less to do with the irreverent and profane." Peter makes a noise of protest in the back of his throat, to which Tony holds up a hand to allow himself the space to finish. "Ah, ah. I'm attempting an apology here, Peter. One long overdue, since the very beginning of our collaboration. Even before then."

Peter blinks. "I don't--I don't understand."

The movement and the speech draw an unconscious smirk from Tony, who in that moment sees nothing but a smaller version of May Parker before him, wide-eyed and impatient, heroic, self-sacrificial, and so endearingly clueless now of all times.

"You were a diversion, in the beginning. An interesting case that Rhodey presented to me as I was flailing--metaphorically, though I am not opposed to doing so literally from time to time--yes, when I was flailing in the throes of my ennui. You were something, someone different, a marvel, a curiosity. And very quickly, when I read your eagerness and your--purity of intent buried beneath all the stumbling wit, I--you became a means to an end.”

Peter frowns. “I wouldn’t quite place such a harsh judgment on your actions, Mr. Stark.”

“Which makes you a fool,” Tony rejoins quickly. He tacks on a wet-eyed and genuine little smile. “The best kind. Nonetheless, as much as I adore your single-minded acceptance of the good in most of humanity, I do wish I could weasel a little more paranoia into you.”

Peter sits back gingerly with his left arm crossed over his right one in its sling. “I think you fill that job quite superfluously all on your own, Mr. Stark.”

The man tosses him a roguish grin. “And so I see your faith in me has not been shaken.”

The boy cocks his head to the side. “There never was a need for it to be,” he says softly, after a beat.

Tony bows his head into his hands and runs his fingers through the unkempt waves of his hair, the stubble on his chin. “What I have been attempting to impress upon you is...I showed far too much enthusiasm for your active participation in this case, even though a mere lick of better judgment would have curbed that excitement in an instant. I should have listened to dear Rhodey. You are capable, yes, you are good, you are--you are so much _better_ than the lot of us tenfold, but you are...Pete, you are fourteen years old. It was not my place to stand you in harm’s way any more than you already voluntarily do on your own. It was--it was my place, rather, to teach you, to mentor you, with respect for your age and everything you had yet to live for. To mentor you responsibly.”

That draws an irreverent little snort from Peter, making Tony’s head shoot up and the man to narrow his eyes up at him.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stark,” Peter wheezes out between breaths. “It’s--the apology was lovely, quite--eloquent--and I accept it and all, though with counterarguments and--and _footnotes_ \--but--” He devolves into another fit of giggles, and almost slaps his own face with his right hand before the ache and pull in his shoulder and casted arm remind him of his pesky injuries. He subsides into teary-eyed and tender mirth. “You? Mentor me responsibly?”

Tony makes a show of straightening himself. “I can--I can mentor responsibly.”

Peter wipes the moisture from one eye, his lip split and chapped now from grinning. “The moment you begin to do that, please let me know. I’ll be handing in my letter of resignation.”

“You are--” Tony splutters. “You are a _lout_!”

Still, they share another moment of eye contact and silent laughter, and that’s all it takes for them to double over in their bruises and wheezing lungs and guffaw together for what feels like forever.

“On a serious note,” Peter pipes up (sounding anything but), “I should say sorry too. I could--I could go on and justify what I did and say that it was because I had cracked the case, and I would be the fastest on the scene, and--but the truth is...it hurt when you sent me away.”

That makes Tony sober almost instantly. He creaks upright from his knees and sinks down on the bed to be closer to the boy and to look at him properly. “I know,” he murmurs. “I recognize that now. Cursed be my perfect hindsight.”

“No, no, no, I didn’t mean to--I don’t want to blame you, sir. But...the fact is I felt I had to--well, do something that proved I would not be a burden to the team. That I was in fact an...asset.”

Tony blinks at him. For some unnamed reason, the little word that Peter lands on to describe himself pierces Tony through the chest, and he has to take a moment to physically breathe and glance up at the ceiling to recenter himself.

“Peter,” he speaks gently. “ _Peter_. Listen to me, my boy. I never--I mean _never_ \--wish for you to regard yourself that way ever again. You are not an asset. No man is an ‘asset’ on this team, much less a boy. We are all equal members--triumvirate, remember?” He gives the kid a little nudge. “And when one is down, he has no need to prove himself. The other two, on the other hand...it is on them to pull him up.”

By this point in the conversation Peter’s eyes are looking up at him, glistening and wide, and Tony feels the dangerous thump in his heart forewarning an emotional dam about to break. HIs mind screams at him to abort the situation, to jump up and holler down the hallway for Pepper, or--or--grab the bowl and tip it over the bed and smash it accidentally for want of a diversion, but--this is not a case. Peter Parker is not a case. Peter Parker is a boy, a very real one, an injured one, one who has been hurting and whom Tony must finally learn to accept that he would lay down his life for. Far be it from him to understand why, but he can no longer question it.

True to form, Peter slaps his left hand over his eye to hide the tears suddenly gathering there. “Stop,” he says, sounding exceedingly nasal. “I already got Aunt May to preach Ecclesiastes at me. Go back to being my irresponsible mentor, please, Mr. Stark.”

“Good heavens,” the man mutters with a grimace, hand hovering over the kid’s shoulder about five seconds away from patting him. “If I have sunk to the level of spouting verses without irony, then truly my sense of identity has begun to wane. Well, then. How would you like to get out of this room for a bit and meet the sheriff who has been making veritable sheep eyes at your unusually attractive aunt?”

Peter sits at attention and looks--frankly--lost as to which part of that sentence to respond to first. “Sheriff Hogan? What is he doing to May?”

Tony stands up and makes his way briskly to another chair on the opposite side of the bedroom, where a package wrapped in brown paper and tied up with a green ribbon lies next to his coat. He tosses the package into the boy’s lap in bed.

“He is not doing anything _to_ May,” Tony corrects him. “I assure you, she is the one doing all the frightening _to_ him.”

Peter grins at him. Sounds just like the aunt he knows. “What’s this?” he asks, hoisting the package with his free hand.

Tony makes an impatient gesture mimicking untying the ribbon. “In the vein of the irreverent: ask and it shall be given to you, seek and ye shall find.”

The boy grumbles something unintelligible under his breath but complies, tugging the ribbon free. As the crinkle of paper falls back and his eyes alight on the pile of folded tweed and velvet before him, he gasps.

“No--Mr. Stark--surely I can’t--”

Tony rolls his eyes. He strides forward to pick up the waistcoat from the pile, a modest shade of burgundy with burnished little buttons down the front. “Yes, you can, and more importantly, you _shall_ , because the frightening Madam Edna does not accept returns and I went through great pains to give her your precise measurements for all of these.” Tony flushes at the sudden realization that he is implying he must have measured the boy in his sleep and not actually taken Peter’s old clothes to the seamstress. “Well,” he amends around a cough into his fist. “Not exceedingly great pains.”

“I can never repay you for this,” Peter insists, looking all too woebegone.

“Complain any further about how unworthy you are of this, and I will dock your pay,” Tony threatens him gently. By God, he wonders why his stomach will not cease to perform somersaults inside him. “Come on, then. Up and at ’em. I want to see how they look on you.”

Peter relents at last and slides carefully off the edge of the bed. Tony instinctually steps toward him to catch him by his good elbow and steady him on his feet. The boy sways there a moment, shooting him a look of gratitude. They stand there before each other for a few more seconds, before Tony understands that the kid is waiting for him to turn around so he can get dressed out of his nightgown.

“Ah,” Tony coughs again, and retreats to the corner.

Several rustling noises and very...Peter-like sounds follow, while the man hums awkwardly and directs his gaze at the ceiling. Suddenly Peter speaks up again, jarring in the silence. “Um...Mr. Stark? A bit of help...please?”

When Tony swivels on his heel, he blinks. Sure enough, Peter has managed to get one arm tangled in the coat without figuring out how to get it over his right shoulder and sling, but it is the rest of the outfit that has Tony second-guessing his own eyesight. Gone are the ill-fitting and off-white soft-collared shirts Peter used to wear around the office under his braces--no doubt inherited from his Uncle Ben. Instead, he has on the crisp white shirt Edna tailored for him, with the stiffer collar round his neck and the corners turned down over the neckerchief hanging there undone. The burgundy waistcoat complements the deep blue trousers, if Tony does say so himself with a round of mental applause at his excellent taste in men’s fashion. It is only the coat, sewn of a similar shade of dark blue tweed, that is presenting Peter with a conundrum.

Tony clears his throat and--wordlessly--comes closer to straighten Peter’s collar and tie the little red scarf under his shirt, smoothening the uneven little folds and tucking the ends in with a pin that Tony takes from his own neckerchief.

The man’s gaze drops down to the copper and blue glow of the disc shining faintly through the white shirt where it meets the opaque material of the waistcoat. Peter follows his line of vision and sobers.

“Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?” Tony whispers.

The boy nods.

Tony is overcome then with the inexplicable urge to weep. Perhaps it is the culmination of everything that has transpired since two nights ago--the fear of losing Peter not once, but twice, and never having the chance to make things right with him, or to dress him and provide for him this way, or--or--but whatever it is, he pushes it down with another masterful little clear of his throat. “Well,” he says, just a tad hoarse, “I’m sorry you need that for now. For your heart to get better.”

“I’m not,” Peter says. Confidently, clearly. There is no regret in his eyes, only a wide and disconcerting field of trust and candidness there.

Tony stares at him.

This time, Peter graces him with a little smirk. “I’m honored to be the recipient of your first, uh, reactor clock, Mr. Stark. And it’s--honestly, it makes me feel a little...stronger? To have it on. Like a--like a real vigilante. A renegade.”

Tony cocks a brow at him, but can’t prevent his mouth from quirking upward as he readjusts Peter’s outfit and drapes the tweed coat neatly over his shoulders. “A renegade, eh? Watch yourself, young buck. I just may have to start calling you Peter Stark.”

One would expect both of them to stiffen the moment the thoughtless remark slips from him, but instead the air seems to be charged with something else: something unspoken but buoyant, secretly hopeful. Promising.

Tony sniffs. He reties the knot in Peter’s sling one last time and slaps his good shoulder in what he will deny later was a quintessential paternal gesture. “Come on, then. The sheriff is waiting to thank you for cracking this case for him. And your aunt--good ol’ Italian spitfire of a woman--she’s been waiting to give you that special tongue-lashing for what you put her through.”

The color drains from Peter’s face so swiftly it is almost comical. “Oh, no, did she--”

Tony cuts him off with a snicker. “Not to worry, my archno-friend. She knows all about the, about your flannel ensemble and your rooftop capering--”

“--For the last time, Mr. Stark, it is not caperi--”

“I mean, I cannot avow that there will be no sharp words said, but she loves you very much. All is forgiven, I think. She is just waiting to see what a…” Tony pokes the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “A fine young man you’ve become.” And he glances up and down Peter’s outfit one more time, hand still lying unconsciously on the kid’s shoulder.

Peter answers with a pout. “All right, but if she starts to come after me for getting buried by scaffold parts--”

Tony winces. “Remind me to address that with you again at a later date.”

Peter gives him a look. “If she starts to come for me, I’m coming back here straightaway to play sick.”

“Fair enough,” says Tony. “And I’ll join you to escape their collective wrath.”

Peter perks up at that. “Oh, could you bring the chess set with you?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

\--

It turns out that Peter does not get to meet the infamous Happy Hogan that afternoon, on account of him being called away suddenly to address a nefarious kitten-stealing case on the other side of the city, but the moment Peter emerges from the bedroom with Tony in tow and May slaps eyes on her newly dressed nephew, the emotions that war visibly on her face make it all worth it.

“Peter Benjamin Parker,” she starts out, eyes swimming and tight bun undone, and this is usually the part where _how dare you_ quickly follows. But words have evidently failed her.

The boy shoots her an awkward grin that resembles a grimace more than anything else. “I’m not dead.”

That gets his aunt to fly to her feet and slap his good arm with the sock she has been darning. “Sass after near-death? You’ve already associated with Mr. Stark far too much.”

Pepper chuckles from the rocking chair behind her, where she has a mahogany box in her lap filled with slips of paper and receipts. She snaps the box shut and slips off her little spectacles. “Tony is, I’m afraid, an irresistible influence on everyone around him, and yet everyone around him fails spectacularly to influence him.”

Tony sniffs and pins Pepper a look. “Is that so? Yet somehow you are the one person I cannot influence.”

“Does it rile you so that you’ve met your match?” she challenges him, brushing past him to put up her box and her notebook in the chest by the fireplace.

From a few feet away, Peter listens to the exchange with a squinty-eyed look. He shares a loaded gaze with his aunt, who smirks at him and lays her head softly on his good shoulder. They both melt into each other’s touch, and May idly fusses with the pin holding his red silk scarf together around his neck.

Pepper cups Peter’s cheek in passing and drops a kiss on the top of his head as she makes to exit the sitting room. “Words cannot express how relieved I am to see you well on your way to recovery, Peter,” she says warmly. “If you’ll excuse me now, I’ll only be a moment.”

She sweeps into the kitchen nearby, and Tony follows, because of course he does. She is Pepper Potts and he--he is Tony Stark.

“I never thanked you,” Tony says, picking up an apple from the nearest basket and tossing it in his hand.

Pepper curves a brow at him. “You have, multiple times--though always vaguely and never with the verbal precision I would have expected from a man like you.”

Tony makes a face. “Well, I meant--thank you for helping me and Rhodey with the whole...operation. Man upstairs knows well enough I would have fainted like a foal at the first sign of the boy’s heart rate dropping if not for your constant and relentless--er, prodding.”

“Encouragement?” Pepper offers.

He scrunches his face. “No, no, prodding was--prodding was definitely the word I had in mind.”

“My heartening, rallying presence, then.”

“Prodding,” Tony quibbles. “I’ve picked my hill and I will die on it.”

Pepper gives in at last to an unwilling wheeze of a laugh. “You and I both know you are a disaster under pressure.”

“I think I did all right!” Tony protests loudly, gesturing behind him in the direction of the sitting room. A beat later, something crashes and Peter lets out a yelp.

“Sorry!” Peter hollers from the other room, even as the man drops his head into his hand. “Was just--nothing’s broken, I swear! Just my arm! I mean, just the, just the one arm! Nothing new! Nothing to see here.”

Pepper smirks at Tony as they both listen to the chaos taking place a few hundred feet away. May’s excitable tone overshadows Peter’s, as they evidently scramble around the room chasing whatever paraphernalia it was that was knocked over and has rolled across the floor.

The woman moves closer with a rustle. A piece of her ginger hair has tugged free from her bun in the middle of her laughing, and she pushes it back impatiently from her fringe now.

Tony, overwhelmed by the sudden presence and very real, very fragrant closeness of Miss Potts, promptly begins to babble.

“Point taken, Pep. Consider me a man humbled, a--a--genius bested, I’ve seen the error of my ways. Truly, I don’t know what I would do without you. I’d have--surely, I’d have fainted on the floor seeing Peter on the operating table. Miscalculated the reactor clock by a, by a wild shot. Drowned, probably. Drunk myself to death. Played the violin till my fingers bled--”

“Forgotten to pay your taxes, maybe?” she adds teasingly.

“Mm. Yes. Very important those are. Taxes. What even are taxes? Far be it from me, a mere mortal, but you--yes--you understand these things--the stuff of a goddess, I wager--”

“Yes, for all the trouble you’ve caused, without a doubt I should be throwing you out of my house,” Pepper says. “After all, it’s I who own this place.”

“But the boredom,” Tony retorts. “Imagine the ennui. Do you not live for the pop and squeal of my inventions when I’ve stumbled across a breakthrough?”

“Your contraptions pop and squeal at half past four in the morning,” Pepper deadpans.

“The cases! Oh, you’d miss us having a rousing discussion on whether the maid did it or the butler--”

“--The butler. It’s always the butler. He is more nefariously inclined toward motives for murder, have you not learned this?”

“Aha! And what about our merry little hunts?”

“I recall our merry little hunts taking place in the sewers, and my sorry head footing the bill for all the property damage.”

“Come on. The trip to Brussels?”

“Explosive.”

“Quebec?”

“Reeking.”

“In my defense, _you_ pulled the lever and _I_ \--”

“No, no, you always do this--”

“Come here--”

Before either of them can think, can blink, even pause to react, Tony has closed the gap between them and pressed his lips to hers, engulfing them completely. Her breath stutters and fails, and then she’s closing her eyes, and he is pulling her closer with his hands at her waist, and she almost wants to reach up to lay a hand on his chest and push him away, but she’s frozen.

And they are kissing.

Everything is exploding behind Tony’s eyelids, every nerve ending alight. It is chaos and euphoria wrapped into one. They breathe together, swaying on their feet, probably, but Tony has nowhere to go because he has stepped back and the two of them have crashed against the counter and Pepper’s presence has managed to shut down every coherent thought in his brain.

At last, at long last, they pull away, chests heaving from the kiss. Pepper meets his gaze with fire in her eyes.

“Uh,” says Tony after a moment. “Did that--was that--did that feel odd?”

And just like that, she is reduced to every bit the babbling mess that he is. “No, it--definitely not. It was not odd.”

“Are you certain? Is this all right? I thought it was all right, but--”

“Quite all right. Yes. Good. Not odd. Not odd at all.”

“I think it was odd,” says Rhodey’s unmistakable, ridiculously deadpan voice from the doorway, and in that moment Tony and Pepper simultaneously feel their stomachs plummet to their feet.

“The rear door,” Pepper hisses. “I left it unlocked…”

Tony points in his best friend’s direction. “This was--this is not what you think.”

“I think it’s precisely what I think,” Rhodey says casually. “You two seem like two...terriers fighting over a grape.”

“Yes, well, see, she had just said that I should pack my things and leave--”

Pepper joins in, “And then _he_ had the audacity to remind me of all the times he thought I enjoyed myself on a hunt, when really, all three of us can agree--”

“--And then she called the trip to Brussels _explosive_ , Rhodey! I had to--”

“You don’t have to do that,” Rhodey says, sitting himself down backward on a kitchen chair and pointing between the two of them. “I was here the whole time.”

Tony folds his arms. “You can make yourself scarce now.”

Rhodey looks at him. “I was here first. You two can find yourselves your own kitchen.”

“He’s bullying you, Pep,” Tony says. “Right here, in your very own home.”

Pepper grabs his hand and tugs him toward the hallway. “Come along, Tony.”

“Yes, madam, straightaway.”

\--

Three months later finds the five of them crammed into the study, poring over case files and costumes, waving away Tony’s incessant smoke rings, chaotic as ever.

“He cannot play a farmhand. Absolutely not. Have you seen his soft baby hands?” May says. She bats her hair impatiently from her eyes and straightens her apron.

“I do not have soft baby hands,” Peter protests. “I use these hands, day in and day out--”

“To make wild gesticulations and knock over my favorite candlesticks, yes, this is common knowledge to us,” Tony finishes for him. “No. You are right, May. A bell boy, perhaps?”

“No, that won’t do,” says Rhodey. “The regulars would recognize him for an outsider in an instant.”

“Newspaper boy.”

“Telegram boy,” Pepper suggests.

Tony snaps his fingers. “Yes. Yes! A telegram boy! You are a genius, Miss Potts.”

“On the contrary. I agreed to marry you.”

“In the eye of the beholder, darling, in the eye of the beholder,” Tony whispers conspiratorially with a wink. He settles back on the arm of Pepper’s chair.

“Well, I say I’m coming with you, because from the sound of it we need someone with medical knowledge and a clear head,” May cuts in.

Tony points at Rhodey in the armchair across him. Rhodey takes a puff of his cigar and raises his hand.

“Someone with medical knowledge who can slip in and out without being noticed,” May amends. “Perhaps Rhodey should be the marksman.”

Rhodey shoots her a wry grin. “I like your style, Mrs. Parker. You are, indeed, the best thing that has happened to this household since Pepper Potts.”

“There _is_ a very capable vigilante sitting right here, you know,” Peter pipes up from his cross-legged position on the Persian rug.

“You’re a little cocker spaniel,” Tony says with a fond wave of his hand. “All the energy from the meals you’ve eaten shoots straight to your muscles and passes your brains.”

Peter rounds on him, jaw dropping in mock offense. Pepper smothers a snicker behind her hand.

They are all interrupted by the shrill ring of the doorbell a second later. Peter scrambles up to answer it, and returns after a few moments and concerning sounds of stumbling with a notecard in his hand.

“Karen and Friday came by,” he says to the others from the doorway, waving the telegram in the air. “Hammer has been spotted boarding the ferry to Ithaca.”

At that, the adults stand to attention. “Go, go, go,” May shoos Rhodey and Tony, flapping her hands at them.

“Ho-ho!” Tony crows as he races past Peter and grabs the boy by the scruff of his neck. “Everyone, in your costumes, quick, quick, time to put the plan into action.”

Peter rolls his eyes, but his smile is as pure and good-natured as ever as he follows his mentor to the cupboard under the stairs where all their favorite paraphernalia lie. He submits himself to Tony’s fussing as the man yanks the boy’s arms into a coat, buttoning it up high to cover the glow of the blue disc still taped there to his chest. 

Peter reciprocates the gesture by scooping up Tony’s favorite top hat from the shelf and placing it on the man’s head. “So the game is afoot?”

The grin that Tony shoots him and the rest of the crew is manic and infectious.

“Indeed, friends. The game is afoot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaaand it's done!! More than half of this beast was typed on my phone in bed and the other half was done on my laptop in a two-hour mania which I should have been spending checking my kiddos' papers but was decidedly...not.
> 
> I know more than one person requested an extension of this universe, and I'm very open to writing one (seeing as I even threw in the name Hammer there at the end), but I probably won't be able to get to it right this minute because the semester is getting hectic for me in terms of writing articles and checking exams and all that. That being said, I will take any and all ideas and suggestions that you may have for a sequel, and if I do find the inspiration and crackhead energy to actually write it, I will be sure to let y'all know!!
> 
> In the meantime, what did you think?! I gotta attribute the whole arc reactor idea to Daisy (notapartytrick), as well as the extensive research on clothing and many suggestions for my cheeky references to the MCU canon ;) Did you laugh? Did you cry? What was your favorite part? Please, please let us know! Your comments breathe life into these dead vampire souls !! <3 -kaleb
> 
> muh tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> muh insta: kc.barrie

**Author's Note:**

> [fic moodboard](https://www.pinterest.com/kcbarrie/writing-moodboards/idss-the-game-is-afoot/)


End file.
